Sophomore Year

Did you know that sophomore is an oxymoron? ‘Sopho’ means wise and ‘moric’ means fool. I was taught that in English class the first week back at school. Things were defiantly changing that year. We had a new high school principal; we will call him Mr. Country. He was round and balding and surprisingly younger than my mom which you probably wouldn’t have guessed if you saw him. I though he at least had to be in his late forties, but later found out he was thirty six. I was open to him coming in at first. I mean I had been burned by a cheating principal before so maybe this guy could turn the place around for the better right?
Classes were harder that year. I didn’t have the teacher I loved and respected so much that year so I was kind of bummed. He was the only teacher that gave us any kind of real outlet to really discuss what we felt and he would rationalize any given situation. Mid day through classes I remember nearly crying at the thought of going a whole year without having a class with ‘Mr. Solomon’. The whole sophomore class missed him as well. We were angry at the ungrateful juniors and seniors who got to have him and the bratty freshmen who claimed that his class was too hard. He wasn’t hard he was just really the only teacher who expected some kind of effort from the athletes of the beloved basketball team.
As you can expect we also got a new math teacher. He was young, in his early twenties, and he was short, maybe 5’5. He had a drill sergeant air about him which, ironically I found out that’s exactly what he used to do. Like most young teachers, he was kind of arrogant. He would assume that we had learned things we didn’t and get frustrated when we didn’t understand. By the first nine weeks half of the class, including myself were getting D’s or F’s. We all had parent/teacher conferences. I had to work my ass off the entire year and barley passed. I remember being seriously depressed about going to that class. The only other class I felt this miserable in was Composition and Research.
We shall call the comp and research teacher Ms. Winy. She was around 28 unmarried and we all knew why. She was incredibly annoying and immature. She would assign us papers and then change her mind. I remember once being told that we were required to do a power point presentation…I didn’t have power point and so I had to go out and buy it. $150 dollars later she changed her mind…thanks bitch. We would spend the class listening to her complaining about her Doc boyfriend (who ended up dumping her) and she would encourage us to give her all the best gossip at our school. If we ended up talking to our friends or not paying attention to her reactions to the school gossip we would be reprimanded. She left my junior year to go teach at a Catholic school. My condolences go out to all those poor students.
That year I also had life skills/speech. I was the only sophomore and had it with four juniors. Three were boys and one was a girl I used to play soccer with. She was dating one of the boys. There currently still together and I wish them all the luck in the world. My art teacher from the previous year was teaching the class and at first I was nervous about being in a class with a bunch of upperclassmen. My fears were soon quelled when I realized how cool they all were. They even gave me a nickname. In life skills we didn’t get much done school wise, but we did talk about school issues. Subtle rule changes were starting to happen. We were no longer ‘allowed’ to go up the back stair way (which was the easiest way to get up to the third floor in the morning). No one abided by this rule because were teenagers. Were lazy and we take short cuts what can I say. Besides no one really understood why we couldn’t use this stair way. It was later speculated in my life skills class with my new buddies that our new principal was afraid that students would make out in the stairwell. It had happened before, but why punish everyone just because a couple of teenagers were being teenagers? Because of our failure to comply with this new rule we were lectured in chapel for a good fifteen minutes. Maybe I’m sounding melodramatic, but it was a series of bizarre rules that frustrated me and a lot of other people to no end. Maybe I’ll post some of the rules from the rule book on a later post and you tell me what you think.
We have a subway and a few other restaurants across the street from our school. Some cross country kids would go there after practice and it was never really a big deal before. Over the intercom one day we were told that we could here by be in trouble if we were caught walking across the street AFTER SCHOOL HOURS! I was aggravated I must admit. At the age of five my parents had taught me proper street crossing procedure. Here is the rule that really got me: we had to ask permission to leave the lunch room to pee. For crying out loud I was fifteen years old! I was pretty sure I could find my way to a bathroom and back!
Back to my favorite and last class of the day though. One day my junior friends and I started to discuss the athletics association. If you’ve ever been to high school you know that the jocks get treated special. If you don’t agree with this statement, that’s because you were either a jock or your just plain stupid. I found out a lot of info that I didn’t know. I knew that some of the basketball players had two study halls, because well they were stupid. I found out that sports that didn’t win state championships like baseball don’t get any funding. The players had to buy their own jerseys while the boy’s basketball team got three pairs of shoes without swiping a credit card. Also there was the whole deal with their annual ‘missionary’ trip. The boys went to Costa Rica where they stayed on the beach or played basketball all day. Nice missionary work boys. To my knowledge the only team that goes on missionary trips is the boys basketball team.
What else is worth mentioning about sophomore year…hum…yes the whole incident with the missing money? People who went to the gym after school or during guy class usually left their things in the locker room. Well money started to disappear. Hundreds of dollars ended up going missing along with some gift cards. Who was the thief you may ask? Wouldn’t it be reasonable to assume that if the administration did know who it was they would fire that person? Not if that person was a former basketball star and son to the parents of some rich board members. This poor fellow fluked out of college and was on drugs. He wasn’t the first member of our school who had gone to college only to flunk out, but he was the first to come back to the school. Everyone suspected him. One student had even caught him in the act, but there is an old saying ‘it’s who you know.’ He stayed on, but was not in the gym anymore.
On the last week of school I was told that Mr. Country was appointed headmaster and that we would be getting a former reform school principal to be our new high school principal. Fun. Also at the end of the year my friend who had been dating someone I didn’t approve of dumped him and in retaliation he posted a video of himself burning old momentous and telling her that he would see her in hell or something to that effect. I never saw the video. Now why I don’t approve of this, it was done off school time and posted on his MySpace. Was this stupid on his part? Maybe, but again it didn’t in any way mention the school. He was suspended for the remainder of the year for not upholding the schools image or something to that effect. In a way I admire him for not giving away the name of the person video tapping the thing. I know who that person is and he has a clean record that didn’t deserve to be marred. He has since graduated and gone on to a good college.
The school year came to a close. I ended the year with a 3.4 thanks to math and I was still hopeful and alright with things. I hadn’t become jaded enough to be so pessimistic about school life and high school yet.