Junior Year Of High School Quotes

Nothing could convince Aunt Nelly to let Vlad stay home for the duration of the school year, which just goes to prove that parents and guardians don't care if they're sending you to face bloodthirsty monsters, so long as you get a B in English.

I don’t know!” he half yells, miserably. “Am I? Do you think I’m bi?” “I can’t tell you that, Alex!” she says. “That’s the whole point!” “Shit,” he says, dropping his head back on the cushions. “I need someone to just tell me. How did you know you were?” “I don’t know, man. I was in my junior year of high school, and I touched a boob. It wasn’t very profound. Nobody’s gonna write an Off-Broadway play about it.” “Really helpful.

Maybe the way he tried to corral me my entire junior year of high school like I was some wayward cow and he was the ranch’s most enthusiastic farmhand?

I don’t know, man. I was in my junior year of high school, and I touched a boob. It wasn’t very profound. Nobody’s gonna write an Off-Broadway play about it.

I’m in my junior year but I can’t take it anymore. The beige walls, the scent of linoleum and used lockers, the shrill bell between classes. High school is sucking the life out of me.

I, on the other hand, still might not be considered a proper grown-up. I had been very much the adult when I was in elementary school. But as I continued on through junior high and high school, on the contrary, I became less grown-up. And then as the years passed, I turned into quite a childlike person. I suppose I just wasn't able to ally myself with time.

In the classics section, she had picked up a copy of The Magic Mountain and recalled the summer between her junior and senior years of high school, when she read it, how she lay in bed hours after she should have gotten up, the sheet growing warmer against her skin as the sun rose higher in the sky, her mother poking her head in now and then to see if she'd gotten up yet, but never suggesting that she should: Eleanor didn't have many rules about child rearing, but one of them was this: Never interrupt reading.

But then over the years I spent time with her because of her, because in junior high school she drowned the dolls in chocolate pudding and called it 'Little People in Deep Shit: a Retrospective.

I made him a promise." Kevin dragged his stare away from Neil's face to follow Andrew's progress. "He's waiting to see if I can keep it." "I don't understand." Kevin said nothing for so long Neil almost gave up waiting for an answer. Finally he explained, "Andrew on his drugs is useless, but Andrew off his drugs is worse. His high school counselor saw the difference between his junior and senior years and swore this medicine saved his life. A sober Andrew is…" Kevin thought for a moment, trying to remember her exact words, and crooked his fingers at Neil as he quoted, "destructive and joyless. "Andrew has neither purpose nor ambition," Kevin said. "I was the first person who ever looked at Andrew and told him he was worth something. When he comes off these drugs and has nothing else to hold him up I will give him something to build his life around." "He agreed to this?" Neil asked. "But he's fighting you every step of the way. Why?" "When I first said you would be Court, why were you upset with me?" "Because I knew it'd never happen," Neil said, "but I wanted it anyway." Kevin said nothing. Neil waited, then realized he'd answered his own question.

According to Fleetfin's research, if you sun-dry the sexual organs of a male and female squid and bring them into contact at the rate of three hundred fifty feet per fifteen seconds or less (the average running speed of a third-year junior high school student), you'll create an explosion surpassing dynamite.

In my high school yearbook there is a note from a girl who wrote, 'I like you even though you are very mean.' I do not remember the girl who wrote this note. I do not remember being mean to her, or to anyone, for that matter. I do remember that I was feral in high school, socially awkward, emotionally closed off, completely lost. Or maybe I don't want to remember being mean because I've changed in the twenty years between then and now. Around my junior year, I went from being quiet and withdrawn to being mean, where mean was saying exactly what I thought and making sarcastic comments relentlessly. Sincerity was dead to me.

Oh, like, I thought we were already there with you being bi and everything,” she says. “Sorry, are we not? Did I skip ahead again? My bad. Hello, would you like to come out to me? I’m listening. Hi.” “I don’t know!” he half yells, miserably. “Am I? Do you think I’m bi?” “I can’t tell you that, Alex!” she says. “That’s the whole point!” “Shit,” he says, dropping his head back on the cushions. “I need someone to just tell me. How did you know you were?” “I don’t know, man. I was in my junior year of high school, and I touched a boob. It wasn’t very profound. Nobody’s gonna write an Off-Broadway play about it.” “Really helpful.” “Yup,” she says, chewing thoughtfully on a chip.

I still have a last-day-of-sixth-grade feeling. All year you’re excited for school to end so you can move on to junior high, but then the day comes and you realize that something that was an important part of your life is dying. And endings are still so new that you don’t know quite how to feel. You find an excuse not to run out the door when the bell rings and school’s out. You talk to your teacher one last time. You use the restroom one last time. You take a circuitous route back to your classroom. On your way out, you look back and sigh, and you experience this deep wishfulness, and you wonder if life is just a series of endings. New beginnings don’t make endings any easier.

Junior year of high school, he had seen a Chinese woman in the Littletown Mall. Thin, with permed hair, gripping plastic bags with the handles twisted around each other. She'd honed in; there was no hiding his face, and when she spoke he understood her Mandarin. She was lost. Could he help? She needed to make a phone call, find a bus. Her face was scared and anxious. Two teenage boys, pale and gangly, had watched and mimicked her accent, and Daniel had said, in English, "I can't speak Chinese." Afterwards, he tried to forget the woman, because when he did think of her, he felt a deep, cavernous loneliness.

The thirteenth-century philosopher Roger Bacon claimed that “nobody can obtain to proficiency in the science of mathematics by the method hitherto known unless he devotes to its study thirty or forty years.” Today, the entire body of mathematics known to Bacon is now acquired by your average high school junior.

One night in my junior year of high school, a friend was helping me prepare for a big party I was throwing while my parents were out of town. She’d been hanging out the last few months with some boys from Fenwick, the local all-boys Catholic high school, and asked if a few of them could come to the party. Sure, I said. Actually, she told me tentatively, she was sort of dating one of them.

Your cells are a country of ten thousand trillion citizens, each devoted in some intensively specific way to your overall well-being. There isn’t a thing they don’t do for you. They let you feel pleasure and form thoughts. They enable you to stand and stretch and caper. When you eat, they extract the nutrients, distribute the energy, and carry off the wastes - all those things you learned about in junior high school biology - but they also remember to make you hungry in the first place and reward you with a feeling of well-being afterward so that you won’t forget to eat again. They keep your hair growing, your ears waxed, your brain quietly purring. They manage every corner of your being. They will jump to your defence the instant you are threatened. They will unhesitatingly die for you - billions of them do so daily. And not once in all your years have you thanked even one of them.

When Kojima was in elementary school, he was a child, of course. A suntanned kid with thin little shins. In high school, Kojima had seemed like a sprouting boy, on the verge of casting off his boyhood skin and becoming a young man. By the time he got to college, he must have been a full-fledged young man, the epitome of youth. I can just imagine. Now having reached his thirties, Kojima was a grown-up. No doubt about it. His behavior was commensurate with his age. The passage of time had been evenly distributed for Kojima, and both his body and mind had developed proportionately. I, on the other hand, still might not be considered a proper grownup. I had been very much the adult when I was in elementary school. But as I continued on through junior high and high school, on the contrary, I became less grown-up. And then as the years passed, I turned into quite a childlike person. I suppose I just wasn't able to ally myself with time.

Imagine if we taught baseball the way that we teach science,” says UC Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik. “We would tell kids about baseball in the first couple of years. By the time they got to be in junior high, maybe we’d give them a drill where they could throw the ball to second base, over and over and over again. In college, they’d get to reproduce great, famous baseball plays, and then they’d never actually get to play the game until they were in graduate school.” High-quality project-based learning is, essentially, playing ball. There

She wanted the boy put in a vise and squashed. She wanted him reamed and punctured and given the laying-on-of-hands. To be beaten from playground to kindergarten, to grammar school, to junior high, to high school. If he was lucky, in high school, the beatings and sadisms would refine themselves, the sea of blood and spittle would drain back down the shore of years and Jim would be left upon the edge of maturity, with God knows what outlook to the future, with a desire, perhaps, to be a wolf among wolves, a dog among dogs, a fiend among fiends. But there was enough of that in the world, already.

I’m not sure what you want, Piper. Do you want me to send money? Would that help?” Curtiss asked. “He’s not like an abandoned pet, Curtiss. God! He’s your father and you could come up and help me out. That would be helpful.” I was angry with him. I felt like once again he had walked away from me and left me at a critical time. When I was a junior in high school, Curtiss went away to college and left me alone to navigate life with my father, and for those two years I held a vicious grudge. Curtiss left me alone to battle my father’s moods, alone to absorb Curtiss’s portion of his criticisms, alone to protect my mother from his cruel tone and even crueler periods of silence. Curtiss visited home rarely, but when he did I made sure that he could feel my wrath underneath my layers of friendly conversation. Finally, when he returned for my own high school graduation, he addressed my years of quiet fury. “Piper, you just don’t know how it is. It’s not like this in other families. It’s different when you get out into the world.

Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations. The stretch of Hudson Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet. I make my own first entrance into it a little after eight when I put out my garbage gcan, surely a prosaic occupation, but I enjoy my part, my little clang, as the junior droves of junior high school students walk by the center of the stage dropping candy wrapper. (How do they eat so much candy so early in the morning?) While I sweep up the wrappers I watch the other rituals of the morning: Mr Halpert unlocking the laundry's handcart from its mooring to a cellar door, Joe Cornacchia's son-in-law stacking out the empty crates from the delicatessen, the barber bringing out his sidewalk folding chair, Mr. Goldstein arranging the coils of wire which proclaim the hardware store is open, the wife of the tenement's super intendent depositing her chunky three-year-old with a toy mandolin on the stoop, the vantage point from which he is learning English his mother cannot speak. Now the primary childrren, heading for St. Luke's, dribble through the south; the children from St. Veronica\s cross, heading to the west, and the children from P.S 41, heading toward the east. Two new entrances are made from the wings: well-dressed and even elegant women and men with brief cases emerge from doorways and side streets. Most of these are heading for the bus and subways, but some hover on the curbs, stopping taxis which have miraculously appeared at the right moment, for the taxis are part of a wider morning ritual: having dropped passengers from midtown in the downtown financial district, they are now bringing downtowners up tow midtown. Simultaneously, numbers of women in housedresses have emerged and as they crisscross with one another they pause for quick conversations that sound with laughter or joint indignation, never, it seems, anything in between. It is time for me to hurry to work too, and I exchange my ritual farewell with Mr. Lofaro, the short, thick bodied, white-aproned fruit man who stands outside his doorway a little up the street, his arms folded, his feet planted, looking solid as the earth itself. We nod; we each glance quickly up and down the street, then look back at eachother and smile. We have done this many a morning for more than ten years, and we both know what it means: all is well. The heart of the day ballet I seldom see, because part off the nature of it is that working people who live there, like me, are mostly gone, filling the roles of strangers on other sidewalks. But from days off, I know enough to know that it becomes more and more intricate. Longshoremen who are not working that day gather at the White Horse or the Ideal or the International for beer and conversation. The executives and business lunchers from the industries just to the west throng the Dorgene restaurant and the Lion's Head coffee house; meat market workers and communication scientists fill the bakery lunchroom.

I like to browse my Facebook time line and occasionally “Like” a photograph posted by a random friend from thirty years ago. I would never in a million years call that friend and say, “That was a real cute photo of your baby that you posted.” But liking the photo is my way of connecting with someone that I felt close to at some point in my life, even if it was only because her locker was next to mine in junior high school. Guess what? Turns out, using social media in this way releases oxytocin. You know you feel good when you do it. Do it more.

In the year 2000, boys and girls did not consider fellatio to be a truely sexual act, any more than tonsil hockey. It was just “fooling around.” The President of the United States at the time used to have a twenty-two-year-old girl, an unpaid volunteer in the presidential palace, the White House, come around to his office for fellatio. He later testified under oath that he had never “had sex” with her. Older Americans tended to be shocked, but junior-high-school, high-school, and college students understood completely what he was saying and wondered what on earth all the fuss was about. The two of them had merely been on second base, hooking up.

There isn’t a thing they don’t do for you. They let you feel pleasure and form thoughts. They enable you to stand and stretch and caper. When you eat, they extract the nutrients, distribute the energy, and carry off the wastes—all those things you learned about in junior high school biology—but they also remember to make you hungry in the first place and reward you with a feeling of well-being afterward so that you won’t forget to eat again. They keep your hair growing, your ears waxed, your brain quietly purring. They manage every corner of your being. They will jump to your defense the instant you are threatened. They will unhesitatingly die for you—billions of them do so daily. And not once in all your years have you thanked even one of them. So

The Southern girl is usually an unsalvageable narcissist by the time she gets to junior high school because she has grasped the charming fact that her body, especially its exclusively female parts, has the power to make strong men weak - and strong governments fall. toppling a government was an easy thing to dream about when i was a little girl because that famous Maryland lady, the Duchess of Windsor, had actually cond it a few years earlier. She had accomplished what we were all taught to do: Cause trouble. 'isn't she wonderful.' we breathed, 'she just got everybody so upset! Wouldn't it be just the most fun to upset a whole country? She almost caused a war - she must have bumped Edward with her bust. oh, I'd just love to start a war, wouldn't you?

BY THE END OF MY JUNIOR YEAR, SCHOOL SHOOTINGS WERE MAKING their way into the news. The first one I heard about was in 1997, when Luke Woodham killed two students and wounded seven others in Pearl, Mississippi. Two months later, in West Paducah, Kentucky, Michael Carneal killed three students at a high school prayer service. In March of 1998, Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden of Jonesboro, Arkansas—one aged thirteen, the other eleven—set off a fire alarm to make their fellow students run outside, then opened fire from the trees. They killed four students and a teacher. Finally, Kip Kinkel went on a rampage in Springfield, Oregon in May of 1998. He murdered both of his parents at home, then went to school, killed two students, and wounded twenty-two others.

One of the bonds between Lily and me is that we both suffer with our teeth. She is twenty years my junior but we wear bridges, each of us. Mine are at the sides, hers are in front. She has lost the four upper incisors. It happened while she was still in high school, out playing golf with her father, whom she adored. The poor old guy was a lush and far too drunk to be out on a golf course that day. Without looking or given warning, he drove from the first tee and on the backswing struck his daughter. It always kills me to think of that cursed hot July golf course, and this drunk from the plumbing supply business, and the girl of fifteen bleeding. Damn these weak drunks! Damn these unsteady men! I can't stand these clowns who go out in public as soon as they get swacked to show how broken-hearted they are. But Lily would never hear a single word against him and wept for him sooner than for herself. She carries his photo in her wallet.

From age thirteen, American girls were under pressure to maintain a façade of sexual experience and sophistication. Among girls, “virgin” was a term of contempt. The old term “dating”—referring to a practice in which a boy asked a girl out for the evening and took her to the movies or dinner—was now deader than “proletariat” or “pornography” or “perversion.” In junior high school, high school, and college, girls headed out in packs in the evening, and boys headed out in packs, hoping to meet each other fortuitously. If they met and some girl liked the looks of some boy, she would give him the nod, or he would give her the nod, and the two of them would retire to a halfway-private room and “hook up.” “Hooking up” was a term known in the year 2000 to almost every American child over the age of nine, but to only a relatively small percentage of their parents, who, even if they heard it, thought it was being used in the old sense of “meeting” someone. Among the children, hooking up was always a sexual experience, but the nature and extent of what they did could vary widely.

Following the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades of middle school, high school would have been a fresh start. When I got to Fairfax High I would insist on being called Suzanne. I would wear my hair feathered or up in a bun. I would have a body that the boys wanted and the girls envied, but I’d be so nice on top of it all that they would feel too guilty to do anything but worship me. I liked to think of myself — having reached a sort of queenly W status — as protecting misfit kids in the cafeteria. When someone taunted Clive Saunders for walking like a girl, I would deliver swift vengeance with my foot to the taunter’s less-protected parts. When the boys teased Phoebe Hart for her sizable breasts, I would give a speech on why boob jokes weren’t funny. I had to forget that I too had made lists in the margins of my notebook when Phoebe walked by: Winnebagos, Hoo-has, Johnny Yellows. At the end of my reveries, I sat in the back of the car as my father drove. I was beyond reproach. I would overtake high school in a matter of days, not years, or, inexplicably, earn an Oscar for Best Actress during my junior year. These were my dreams on Earth.

I was not able to sleep that night. To be honest, I didn’t even try. I stood in front of my living room window, staring out at the bright lights of New York City. I don’t know how long I stood there; in fact, I didn’t see the millions of multicolored lights or the never-ending streams of headlights and taillights on the busy streets below. Instead, I saw, in my mind’s eye, the crowded high school classrooms and halls where my friends and I had shared triumphs and tragedies, where the ghosts of our past still reside. Images flickered in my mind. I saw the faces of teachers and fellow students I hadn’t seen in years. I heard snatches of songs I had rehearsed in third period chorus. I saw the library where I had spent long hours studying after school. Most of all, I saw Marty. Marty as a shy sophomore, auditioning for Mrs. Quincy, the school choir director. Marty singing her first solo at the 1981 Christmas concert. Marty at the 1982 Homecoming Dance, looking radiant after being selected as Junior Princess. Marty sitting alone in the chorus practice room on the last day of our senior year. I stared long and hard at those sepia-colored memories. And as my mind carried me back to the place I had sworn I’d never return to, I remembered.

the Wilmington coup of 1898 was even mentioned— If the Wilmington massacre of 1898 was even mentioned— (how would the massacred name it?) If the Campaign for White Supremacy leading up to the 1898 elections was even mentioned in the junior-year class on the history of North Carolina, the events were described as another eruption of Negro dissatisfaction which, once expressed, quieted. But in the story of the campaign (for white supremacy), the Negro had become unruly, needed instead to be ruled once more out, “Negro rule” ousted into the swampy fantastic as fear, as specter, as a promise. The phantasm of Negro rule was what the high school textbook never acknowledged had rallied the Wilmington race (war) of 1898, the riot planned and instigated, orderly disorder, the wrong the Redeemers sought to riot up, right justifying anything, even murder, the declaration to “choke the Cape Fear River with the carcasses” of whatever the Negro populating their fantasies was—threatening and promising domination, threatening revenge, promising a North Carolina governed by the many not the few. A thousand Black rapists (each vote a thousand more) haunted the campaign the Redeemers rallied to wage. They claimed the fight to protect their honor. For, if this time they didn’t prevail, who could imagine what they would be subject to?

He sometimes thought that the real thing that distinguished him and Malcolm from Jude and Willem was not race or wealth, but Jude’s and Willem’s depthless capacity for wonderment: their childhoods had been so paltry, so gray, compared to his, that it seemed they were constantly being dazzled as adults. The June after they graduated, the Irvines had gotten them all tickets to Paris, where, it emerged, they had an apartment—“a tiny apartment,” Malcolm had clarified, defensively—in the seventh. He had been to Paris with his mother in junior high, and again with his class in high school, and between his sophomore and junior years of college, but it wasn’t until he had seen Jude’s and Willem’s faces that he was able to most vividly realize not just the beauty of the city but its promise of enchantments. He envied this in them, this ability they had (though he realized that in Jude’s case at least, it was a reward for a long and punitive childhood) to still be awestruck, the faith they maintained that life, adulthood, would keep presenting them with astonishing experiences, that their marvelous years were not behind them. He remembered too watching them try uni for the first time, and their reactions—like they were Helen Keller and were just comprehending that that cool splash on their hands had a name, and that they could know it—made him both impatient and intensely envious. What must it feel like to be an adult and still discovering the world’s pleasures?

Postscript, 2005 From the Publisher ON APRIL 7, 2004, the Mid-Hudson Highland Post carried an article about an appearance that John Gatto made at Highland High School. Headlined “Rendered Speechless,” the report was subtitled “Advocate for education reform brings controversy to Highland.” The article relates the events of March 25 evening of that year when the second half of John Gatto’s presentation was canceled by the School Superintendent, “following complaints from the Highland Teachers Association that the presentation was too controversial.” On the surface, the cancellation was in response to a video presentation that showed some violence. But retired student counselor Paul Jankiewicz begged to differ, pointing out that none of the dozens of students he talked to afterwards were inspired to violence. In his opinion, few people opposing Gatto had seen the video presentation. Rather, “They were taking the lead from the teacher’s union who were upset at the whole tone of the presentation.” He continued, “Mr. Gatto basically told them that they were not serving kids well and that students needed to be told the truth, be given real-life learning experiences, and be responsible for their own education. [Gatto] questioned the validity and relevance of standardized tests, the prison atmosphere of school, and the lack of relevant experience given students.” He added that Gatto also had an important message for parents: “That you have to take control of your children’s education.” Highland High School senior Chris Hart commended the school board for bringing Gatto to speak, and wished that more students had heard his message. Senior Katie Hanley liked the lecture for its “new perspective,” adding that ”it was important because it started a new exchange and got students to think for themselves.” High School junior Qing Guo found Gatto “inspiring.” Highland teacher Aliza Driller-Colangelo was also inspired by Gatto, and commended the “risk-takers,” saying that, following the talk, her class had an exciting exchange about ideas. Concluded Jankiewicz, the students “were eager to discuss the issues raised. Unfortunately, our school did not allow that dialogue to happen, except for a few teachers who had the courage to engage the students.” What was not reported in the newspaper is the fact that the school authorities called the police to intervene and ‘restore the peace’ which, ironically enough, was never in the slightest jeopardy as the student audience was well-behaved and attentive throughout. A scheduled evening meeting at the school between Gatto and the Parents Association was peremptorily forbidden by school district authorities in a final assault on the principles of free speech and free assembly… There could be no better way of demonstrating the lasting importance of John Taylor Gatto’s work, and of this small book, than this sorry tale. It is a measure of the power of Gatto’s ideas, their urgency, and their continuing relevance that school authorities are still trying to shut them out 12 years after their initial publication, afraid even to debate them. — May the crusade continue! Chris Plant Gabriola Island, B.C. February, 2005

De Villiers was shortlisted for the South African national hockey squad,’ the article says. True or false? False. In truth, I played hockey for one year at high school and was a member of the Afrikaanse Hoër Seunskool Under-16A team that beat our near neighbours and rivals at Pretoria Boys’ High for the first time, but I was never shortlisted for the national hockey squad, or ever came remotely close to that level. ‘De Villiers was shortlisted for the South African national football squad,’ the article says. True or false? False. I have never played any organised football (soccer). We used to kick a ball around during break at school and the game has become part of the Proteas’ warm-up routine. That is all. ‘De Villiers was the captain of South Africa junior rugby,’ the article says. True or false? False. I played rugby at primary school and high school, and enjoyed every minute, but I never represented South Africa at any level, either at SA Schools or SA Under-20, and was never captain. ‘De Villiers is still the holder of six national school swimming records,’ the article says. True or false? False. As far as I recall, I did set an Under-9 breaststroke record at Warmbaths Primary School but I have never held any national school swimming records, not even for a day. ‘De Villiers has the record fastest 100 metres time among South African junior sprinters,’ the article says. True or false? False. I did not sprint at all at school. Elsewhere on the Internet, to my embarrassment, there are articles in which the great sprinter Usain Bolt is asked which cricketer could beat him in a sprint and he replies ‘AB de Villiers’. Maybe, just maybe, I would beat him if I were riding a motorbike. ‘De Villiers was a member of the national junior Davis Cup tennis team,’ the article says. True or false? Almost true. As far as I know, there was no such entity as the national junior Davis Cup team, but I did play tennis as a youngster, loved the game and was occasionally ranked as the national No. 1 in my age group. ‘De Villiers was a national Under-19 badminton

MY PROCESS I got bullied quite a bit as a kid, so I learned how to take a punch and how to put up a good fight. God used that. I am not afraid of spiritual “violence” or of facing spiritual fights. My Dad was drafted during Vietnam and I grew up an Army brat, moving around frequently. God used that. I am very spiritually mobile, adaptable, and flexible. My parents used to hand me a Bible and make me go look up what I did wrong. God used that, as well. I knew the Word before I knew the Lord, so studying Scripture is not intimidating to me. I was admitted into a learning enrichment program in junior high. They taught me critical thinking skills, logic, and Greek Mythology. God used that, too. In seventh grade I was in school band and choir. God used that. At 14, before I even got saved, a youth pastor at my parents’ church taught me to play guitar. God used that. My best buddies in school were a druggie, a Jewish kid, and an Irish soccer player. God used that. I broke my back my senior year and had to take theatre instead of wrestling. God used that. I used to sleep on the couch outside of the Dean’s office between classes. God used that. My parents sent me to a Christian college for a semester in hopes of getting me saved. God used that. I majored in art, advertising, astronomy, pre-med, and finally English. God used all of that. I made a woman I loved get an abortion. God used (and redeemed) that. I got my teaching certification. I got plugged into a group of sincere Christian young adults. I took courses for ministry credentials. I worked as an autism therapist. I taught emotionally disabled kids. And God used each of those things. I married a pastor’s daughter. God really used that. Are you getting the picture? San Antonio led me to Houston, Houston led me to El Paso, El Paso led me to Fort Leonard Wood, Fort Leonard Wood led me back to San Antonio, which led me to Austin, then to Kentucky, then to Belton, then to Maryland, to Pennsylvania, to Dallas, to Alabama, which led me to Fort Worth. With thousands of smaller journeys in between. The reason that I am able to do the things that I do today is because of the process that God walked me through yesterday. Our lives are cumulative. No day stands alone. Each builds upon the foundation of the last—just like a stairway, each layer bringing us closer to Him. God uses each experience, each lesson, each relationship, even our traumas and tragedies as steps in the process of becoming the people He made us to be. They are steps in the process of achieving the destinies that He has encoded into the weave of each of our lives. We are journeymen, finding the way home. What is the value of the journey? If the journey makes us who we are, then the journey is priceless.

To see how we separate, we first have to examine how we get together. Friendships begin with interest. We talk to someone. They say something interesting and we have a conversation about it. However, common interests don’t create lasting bonds. Otherwise, we would become friends with everyone with whom we had a good conversation. Similar interests as a basis for friendship doesn’t explain why we become friends with people who have completely different interests than we do. In time, we discover common values and ideals. However, friendship through common values and ideals doesn’t explain why atheists and those devout in their faith become friends. Vegans wouldn’t have non-vegan friends. In the real world, we see examples of friendships between people with diametrically opposed views. At the same time, we see cliques form in churches and small organizations dedicated to a particular cause, and it’s not uncommon to have cliques inside a particular belief system dislike each other. So how do people bond if common interests and common values don’t seem to be the catalyst for lasting friendships? I find that people build lasting connections through common problems and people grow apart when their problems no longer coincide. This is why couples especially those with children tend to lose their single friends. Their primary problems have become vastly different. The married person’s problems revolve around family and children. The single person’s problem revolves around relationships with others and themselves. When the single person talks about their latest dating disaster, the married person is thinking I’ve already solved this problem. When the married person talks about finding good daycare, the single person is thinking how boring the problems of married life can be. Eventually marrieds and singles lose their connection because they don’t have common problems. I look back at friends I had in junior high and high school. We didn’t become friends because of long nights playing D&D. That came later. We were all loners and outcasts in our own way. We had one shared problem that bound us together: how to make friends and relate to others while feeling so “different”. That was the problem that made us friends. Over the years as we found our own answers and went to different problems, we grew apart. Stick two people with completely different values and belief systems on a deserted island where they have to cooperate to survive. Then stick two people with the same values and interests together at a party. Which pair do you think will form the stronger bond? When I was 20, I was living on my own. I didn’t have many friends who were in college because I couldn’t relate to them. I was worrying about how to pay rent and trying to stretch my last few dollars for food at the end of the month. They were worried about term papers. In my life now, the people I spend the most time with have kids, have careers, are thinking about retirement and are figuring out their changing roles and values as they get older. These are problems that I relate to. We solve them in different ways because our values though compatible aren’t similar. I feel connected hearing about how they’ve chosen to solve those issues in a way that works for them.

ever. Amen. Thank God for self-help books. No wonder the business is booming. It reminds me of junior high school, where everybody was afraid of the really cool kids because they knew the latest, most potent putdowns, and were not afraid to use them. Dah! But there must be another reason that one of the best-selling books in the history of the world is Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus by John Gray. Could it be that our culture is oh so eager for a quick fix? What a relief it must be for some people to think “Oh, that’s why we fight like cats and dogs, it is because he’s from Mars and I am from Venus. I thought it was just because we’re messed up in the head.” Can you imagine Calvin Consumer’s excitement and relief to get the video on “The Secret to her Sexual Satisfaction” with Dr. GraySpot, a picture chart, a big pointer, and an X marking the spot. Could that “G” be for “giggle” rather than Dr. “Graffenberg?” Perhaps we are always looking for the secret, the gold mine, the G-spot because we are afraid of the real G-word: Growth—and the energy it requires of us. I am worried that just becoming more educated or well-read is chopping at the leaves of ignorance but is not cutting at the roots. Take my own example: I used to be a lowly busboy at 12 East Restaurant in Florida. One Christmas Eve the manager fired me for eating on the job. As I slunk away I muttered under my breath, “Scrooge!” Years later, after obtaining a Masters Degree in Psychology and getting a California license to practice psychotherapy, I was fired by the clinical director of a psychiatric institute for being unorthodox. This time I knew just what to say. This time I was much more assertive and articulate. As I left I told the director “You obviously have a narcissistic pseudo-neurotic paranoia of anything that does not fit your myopic Procrustean paradigm.” Thank God for higher education. No wonder colleges are packed. What if there was a language designed not to put down or control each other, but nurture and release each other to grow? What if you could develop a consciousness of expressing your feelings and needs fully and completely without having any intention of blaming, attacking, intimidating, begging, punishing, coercing or disrespecting the other person? What if there was a language that kept us focused in the present, and prevented us from speaking like moralistic mini-gods? There is: The name of one such language is Nonviolent Communication. Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication provides a wealth of simple principles and effective techniques to maintain a laser focus on the human heart and innocent child within the other person, even when they have lost contact with that part of themselves. You know how it is when you are hurt or scared: suddenly you become cold and critical, or aloof and analytical. Would it not be wonderful if someone could see through the mask, and warmly meet your need for understanding or reassurance? What I am presenting are some tools for staying locked onto the other person’s humanness, even when they have become an alien monster. Remember that episode of Star Trek where Captain Kirk was turned into a Klingon, and Bones was freaking out? (I felt sorry for Bones because I’ve had friends turn into Cling-ons too.) But then Spock, in his cool, Vulcan way, performed a mind meld to determine that James T. Kirk was trapped inside the alien form. And finally Scotty was able to put some dilithium crystals into his phaser and destroy the alien cloaking device, freeing the captain from his Klingon form. Oh, how I wish that, in my youth or childhood,

What could I say about Bellingrath Junior High? Not much, except it was named after my secret hero, Bernard Bellingrath. But Barney wasn’t the kind of hero who rescued a kid from a burning building or found a cure for a disease. Barney dropped a big load of money on our school to build the gym, stadium, and later the library annex. As his reward, a faded portrait hung on the wall of the visitors’ area inside the main entrance. But that wasn’t the reason he was my hero. According to legend, Barney had been born with a tail. A tail. Grand-mere Robichaud, who’d once seen such a tail on a baby’s pink bottom, said he could’ve been mistaken for the main course at a cochon de lait—a Cajun pig roast. But Barney’s parents were very religious, so they refused to have the tail removed. In spite of that decision, Barney grew up to be the richest and most powerful man in town. But that still wasn’t the reason he was my hero. The fact that he decided to keep the tail anyway—that was the reason. Now, all these years later, you’d think physical imperfections would be tolerated at a school practically founded by someone with a tail. But no.

I have a complicated spiritual history. Here's the short version: I was born into a Mass-going Roman Catholic family, but my parents left the church when I was in the fifth grade and joined a Southern Baptist church—yes, in Connecticut. I am an alumnus of Wheaton College—Billy Graham's alma mater in Illinois, not the Seven Sisters school in Massachusetts—and the summer between my junior and senior year of (Christian) high school, I spent a couple of months on a missions trip performing in whiteface as a mime-for-the-Lord on the streets of London's West End. Once I left home for Wheaton, I ended up worshiping variously (and when I could haul my lazy tuckus out of bed) at the nondenominational Bible church next to the college, a Christian hippie commune in inner-city Chicago left over from the Jesus Freak movement of the 1960s, and an artsy-fartsy suburban Episcopal parish that ended up splitting over same-sex issues. My husband of more than a decade likes to describe himself as a “collapsed Catholic,” and for more than twenty-five years, I have been a born-again Christian. Groan, I know. But there's really no better term in the current popular lexicon to describe my seminal spiritual experience. It happened in the summer of 1980 when I was about to turn ten years old. My parents had both had born-again experiences themselves about six months earlier, shortly before our family left the Catholic church—much to the shock and dismay of the rest of our extended Irish and/or Italian Catholic family—and started worshiping in a rented public grade school gymnasium with the Southern Baptists. My mother had told me all about what she'd experienced with God and how I needed to give my heart to Jesus so I could spend eternity with him in heaven and not frying in hell. I was an intellectually stubborn and precocious child, so I didn't just kneel down with her and pray the first time she told me about what was going on with her and Daddy and Jesus. If something similar was going to happen to me, it was going to happen in my own sweet time. A few months into our family's new spiritual adventure, after hearing many lectures from Mom and sitting through any number of sermons at the Baptist church—each ending with an altar call and an invitation to make Jesus the Lord of my life—I got up from bed late one Sunday night and went downstairs to the den where my mother was watching television. I couldn't sleep, which was unusual for me as a child. I was a champion snoozer. In hindsight I realize something must have been troubling my spirit. Mom went into the kitchen for a cup of tea and left me alone with the television, which she had tuned to a church service. I don't remember exactly what the preacher said in his impassioned, sweaty sermon, but I do recall three things crystal clearly: The preacher was Jimmy Swaggart; he gave an altar call, inviting the folks in the congregation in front of him and at home in TV land to pray a simple prayer asking Jesus to come into their hearts; and that I prayed that prayer then and there, alone in the den in front of the idiot box. Seriously. That is precisely how I got “saved.” Alone. Watching Jimmy Swaggart on late-night TV. I also spent a painful vacation with my family one summer at Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's Heritage USA Christian theme park in South Carolina. But that's a whole other book…

45. Remember that advanced placement doesn’t necessarily have to mean early graduation. Our two older children were talented in math and science, and easily completed more than the required number of secondary credits in sciences and humanities well before their peers. We drove our oldest son two hours away to live in a dorm at a state university the week before his 18th birthday, and our second-born graduated from high school when she was 15. Her college adviser mapped a plan where she could have finished her PhD in nursing by the time she was 21! Academically, they were fine. But socially and emotionally, it was tough to transition to the rigors of full-time college life (even junior college) one or two years before their traditionally-schooled friends. Because of that, their younger brother, a scholar in his own right, was not given the option to graduate early. Although he was frustrated with this limitation, it has alleviated a lot of pressure the other kids were forced to deal with before they had reached appropriate emotional maturity.

Roger Bannister is famous as the first person to run a mile in under 4 minutes. But his world record only lasted 46 days. Once he showed it could be done, lots of others followed. Ten years later Jim Ryun ran a 3:59 mile as a high school junior.

improve your reflective thinking and writing skills with this feedback. Budget numerous additional hours for the following purposes: Research colleges; prepare for the SAT or ACT with Writing and SAT Subject Tests (“SAT IIs”), if these are not yet done by junior year; work with teachers, your school counselor, and any other non-school recommenders; attend college-related events; prepare for interviews; and take care of whatever else may be necessary to ensure you are submitting high-quality applications on time—on top of your busy schoolwork and extracurricular activities. Try not to take rejections personally. Acceptances or rejections—in regards to college admissions and life as a whole—should

The mother of a student in Europe who was between his junior and senior years of high school called Motto in a frantic state. She had just read somewhere that college admissions offices looked for kids who had spent their summers in enriching ways, ideally doing charity work, and her son was due to be on vacation with the rest of the family in August. “Should we ditch our plans,” she asked Motto, “and have him build dirt roads?” Motto reminded her that she lived in a well-paved European capital. “Where would these dirt roads be?” he said. “India?” she suggested. “Africa?” She hadn’t worked it out. But if Yale might be impressed by an image of her son with a small spade, large shovel, rake or jackhammer in his chafed hands, she was poised to find a third-world setting that would produce that sweaty and ennobling tableau.

Today is the first day in the next chapter of my life.  My best friend, Ivy, and I are leaving home to finish college. We will be roommates and have the time of our lives. She has been staying at our house since November of our senior year in high school.  My parents agreed to help us both with college if we would take two years of basic courses at the local junior college.  Now we are moving to Springfield, Missouri to attend Missouri State University. 

Iris is my opposite in all ways small. She loves reality TV, finds movies too long, and only reads when it’s for an assignment. Her idea of fun involves a credit card and an open mall, and she has harbored a massive crush on Justin Bieber, despite all his WTFuckery, since her junior year of high school. Her continuing love of The Bieb is evident by the fact that her favorite nightshirt is a My World concert tee. And while the image of his face plastered over her boobs is more than creepy, I hate that she hides the shirt whenever Henry comes around. Or rather, I hate that Henry makes her feel like she should to hide it for fear he’ll make fun of her.

This may sound funny but somewhere in the back of my mind I thought the world would stop for my first day of JH. The day proved me wrong and I've grown to realize that nothing will be quite as I dreamed them up.

spring of 1915, nearly a year after the start of the Great War, when a stocky, prematurely balding serviceman arrived on leave in the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s grandiose capital of Vienna. His name was Jakob Georg Goldberger, and it was on that afternoon that he first glimpsed and fell instantly in love with a high school girl, Franzi Gutmann, thirteen years his junior. Was it sordid? Just another tiresome example of male foolishness? Or was it more romantic, a lonely soldier searching for innocence in a misery-soaked world? Raised

The Lost Boys had hardly unpacked by the time they started appearing in local newspaper headlines for their exploits on high school track teams. “Only months after settling in Michigan, two Sudanese refugees are finding that they are among the fastest high school runners in the state,” went the lead of one AP article. Another, in the Lansing State Journal, noted that Abraham Mach, a Lost Boy who had no competitive running experience before arriving at East Lansing High, was the most outstanding performer in the thirteen-to-fourteen age group at the 2001 National AAU Junior Olympic Games, medaling in three events. Mach, who had been living in a Kenyan refugee camp just one year earlier, went on to become an NCAA All-American at Central Michigan in the 800-meters.

She had the look, I thought, of the girls who leave high school junior year to clerk in dime stores in the South; huskily spoken, attractive, a little sharp, a little cheap, and, to a man of my reading, properly sordid as a supporting character in the experience I was about to collect.

Foreword As a true blue Southern girl I have often wondered…if preppies could have their own handbook…why not us? And now at last, my two good friends Deborah Ford and Edie Hand have written the definitive handbook for Southern gals raised in the South. One must simply not leave home without it! It deserves a place on your shelf between Gone With the Wind and the Memphis Junior League cookbook, and I predict in years to come it will be passed down to daughters along with the family silver and great-grandmother’s lace doilies. It is funny, wise, charming, and smart, just like the two gals who wrote it. As modern Southern women we have learned to network with one another and share all the good advice and recipes and rules of accepted behavior that have been handed down to us (it’s a rough world out there). And so in keeping with that wonderful tradition I would like to share some advice my own wise Southern mother gave to me. When I was in high school contemplating whether to take Home Economics or not, my mother exclaimed: “Oh no, darling…you must never learn to cook and clean or they will expect you to do it!” It is advice that has served me well throughout the years. Good luck in all you do! -Fannie Flagg

There were only fifty students in the school at any given time. The juniors were currently providing services at different Households; the total number of Bahriji students was approximately one hundred boys per year. Although Bahriji was a Co-ed school, a high wall separated the girls’ section from the boys. It was really two separate schools located on the same expansive oasis compound. This dividing of the sexes is a standard practice throughout the Middle Eastern world.

In a remarkable study published recently, hundreds of children were followed for a period of twenty-four years, from junior high school to adulthood. Researchers found that low fiber intake early on was associated with stiffening of the arteries leading up to the brain—a key risk factor for stroke.

Helen, a junior high math teacher in Minnesota, spent most of the school week teaching a difficult “new math” lesson. She could tell her students were frustrated and restless by week’s end. They were becoming rowdy so she told them to put their books away. She then instructed the class to take out clean sheets of paper. She gave each of them this assignment: Write down every one of your classmates’ names on the left, and then, on the right, put down one thing you like about that student. The tense and rowdy mood subsided and the room quieted when the students went to work. Their moods lifted as they dug into the assignment. There was frequent laughter and giggling. They looked around the room, sharing quips about one another. Helen’s class was a much happier group when the bell signaled the end of the school day. She took their lists home over the weekend and spent both days off recording what was said about each student on separate sheets of paper so she could pass on all the nice things said about each person without giving away who said what. The next Monday she handed out the lists she’d made for each student. The room buzzed with excitement and laughter. “Wow. Thanks! This is the coolest!” “I didn’t think anyone even noticed me!” “Someone thinks I’m beautiful?” Helen had come up with the exercise just to settle down her class, but it ended up giving them a big boost. They grew closer as classmates and more confident as individuals. She could tell they all seemed more relaxed and joyful. About ten years later, Helen learned that one of her favorite students in that class, a charming boy named Mark, had been killed while serving in Vietnam. She received an invitation to the funeral from Mark’s parents, who included a note saying they wanted to be sure she came to their farmhouse after the services to speak with them. Helen arrived and the grieving parents took her aside. The father showed her Mark’s billfold and then from it he removed two worn pieces of lined paper that had been taped, folded, and refolded many times over the years. Helen recognized her handwriting on the paper and tears came to her eyes. Mark’s parents said he’d always carried the list of nice things written by his classmates. “Thank you so much for doing that,” his mother said. “He treasured it, as you can see.” Still teary-eyed, Helen walked into the kitchen where many of Mark’s former junior high classmates were assembled. They saw that Mark’s parents had his list from that class. One by one, they either produced their own copies from wallets and purses or they confessed to keeping theirs in an album, drawer, diary, or file at home.

Helen, a junior high math teacher in Minnesota, spent most of the school week teaching a difficult “new math” lesson. She could tell her students were frustrated and restless by week’s end. They were becoming rowdy so she told them to put their books away. She then instructed the class to take out clean sheets of paper. She gave each of them this assignment: Write down every one of your classmates’ names on the left, and then, on the right, put down one thing you like about that student. The tense and rowdy mood subsided and the room quieted when the students went to work. Their moods lifted as they dug into the assignment. There was frequent laughter and giggling. They looked around the room, sharing quips about one another. Helen’s class was a much happier group when the bell signaled the end of the school day. She took their lists home over the weekend and spent both days off recording what was said about each student on separate sheets of paper so she could pass on all the nice things said about each person without giving away who said what. The next Monday she handed out the lists she’d made for each student. The room buzzed with excitement and laughter. “Wow. Thanks! This is the coolest!” “I didn’t think anyone even noticed me!” “Someone thinks I’m beautiful?” Helen had come up with the exercise just to settle down her class, but it ended up giving them a big boost. They grew closer as classmates and more confident as individuals. She could tell they all seemed more relaxed and joyful. About ten years later, Helen learned that one of her favorite students in that class, a charming boy named Mark, had been killed while serving in Vietnam. She received an invitation to the funeral from Mark’s parents, who included a note saying they wanted to be sure she came to their farmhouse after the services to speak with them. Helen arrived and the grieving parents took her aside. The father showed her Mark’s billfold and then from it he removed two worn pieces of lined paper that had been taped, folded, and refolded many times over the years. Helen recognized her handwriting on the paper and tears came to her eyes. Mark’s parents said he’d always carried the list of nice things written by his classmates. “Thank you so much for doing that,” his mother said. “He treasured it, as you can see.” Still teary-eyed, Helen walked into the kitchen where many of Mark’s former junior high classmates were assembled. They saw that Mark’s parents had his list from that class. One by one, they either produced their own copies from wallets and purses or they confessed to keeping theirs in an album, drawer, diary, or file at home. Helen the teacher was a “people builder.” She instinctively found ways to build up her students. Being a people builder means you consistently find ways to invest in and bring out the best in others. You give without asking for anything in return. You offer advice, speak faith into them, build their confidence, and challenge them to go higher. I’ve found that all most people need is a boost. All they need is a little push, a little encouragement, to become what God has created them to be. The fact is, none of us will reach our highest potential by ourselves. We need one another. You can be the one to tip the scales for someone else. You can be the one to stir up their seeds of greatness.

the Girl Scout Cookie drives I’d organized, and how I’d been class mother for both Paul and Allie in their grade-school years. The last year Paul was in junior high, I’d been president of the PTA. My kids’ teeth were straight, and they both were grounded and obtained above-average grades.

My plan was to just make it through my junior year of high school and to promise myself to never grow up. It almost happened that way too...until I met a boy named Hayden who changed my life forever.

It’s a perspective on story that may also shed light on why you and I and everyone else spend a couple of hours each day concocting tales that we rarely remember and more rarely share. By day I mean night, and the tales are those we produce during REM sleep. Well over a century since Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, there is still no consensus on why we dream. I read Freud’s book for a junior-year high school class called Hygiene (yes, that’s really what it was called), a somewhat bizarre requirement taught by the school’s gym teachers and sports coaches that focused on first aid and common standards of cleanliness. Lacking material to fill an entire semester, the class was padded by mandatory student presentations on topics deemed loosely relevant. I chose sleep and dreams and probably took it all too seriously, reading Freud and spending after-school hours combing through research literature. The wow moment for me, and for the class too, was the work of Michel Jouvet, who in the late 1950s explored the dream world of cats.32 By impairing part of the cat brain (the locus coeruleus, if you like that sort of thing), Jouvet removed a neural block that ordinarily prevents dream thoughts from stimulating bodily action, resulting in sleeping cats who crouched and arched and hissed and pawed, presumably reacting to imaginary predators and prey. If you didn’t know the animals were asleep, you might think they were practicing a feline kata. More recently, studies on rats using more refined neurological probes have shown that their brain patterns when dreaming so closely match those recorded when awake and learning a new maze that researchers can track the progress of the dreaming rat mind as it retraces its earlier steps.33 When cats and rats dream it surely seems they’re rehearsing behaviors relevant to survival. Our common ancestor with cats and rodents lived some seventy or eighty million years ago, so extrapolating a speculative conclusion across species separated by tens of thousands of millennia comes with ample warning labels. But one can imagine that our language-infused minds may produce dreams for a similar purpose: to provide cognitive and emotional workouts that enhance knowledge and exercise intuition—nocturnal sessions on the flight simulator of story. Perhaps that is why in a typical life span we each spend a solid seven years with eyes closed, body mostly paralyzed, consuming our self-authored tales.34 Intrinsically, though, storytelling is not a solitary medium. Storytelling is our most powerful means for inhabiting other minds. And as a deeply social species, the ability to momentarily move into the mind of another may have been essential to our survival and our dominance. This offers a related design rationale for coding story into the human behavioral repertoire—for identifying, that is, the adaptive utility of our storytelling instinct.

If it’s a girl,” she continued, “let’s not allow her too much education.” “I agree,” Matsuda answered. “Too much schooling is no good anyway.” “Of course, we’ll have to send her for the compulsory years.” “No, they’re the worst. Let’s hire tutors.” “Far too expensive. I’ll never agree to that,” Fumiko replied. “No, she can just go to the local school. When she graduates from junior high, I’ll keep her at home and treat her like a maid. By this time of the morning, she’ll be up cooking our breakfast. I’ll be lying in bed like this, taking it easy with you.” “That sounds nice.” “So it appeals to you. In that case, I’ll make her cook breakfast when she’s in grammar school.” “Will a first-grader be able to cook?” “She won’t have any choice. And she’d better get the rice just right.” “The poor little thing!” “But it’s best to be strict with girls — better for them.” “True.” “I’m not going to have a girl who thinks too much. Let’s raise her so she’ll never talk back. I don’t mean just so she can restrain herself — I want her incapable of talking back — a girl who has no opinions of her own. A girl who does what she’s told, automatically, like an idiot. Even her face must be an idiot’s face.” “A girl like a doll.” “Yes. When she’s small, I’ll train her to serve other people, like a good little wife — like the girls in ancient China. As soon as she gets out of school, I’ll marry her off.” “I’ll go and visit her. I’ll take her some of that sugar we got as a present, behind your back.” “Will you indeed.” “But you never use it to cook with. There’s too much, anyway.” “How do you know?” “You told me.” “Did I? Well, take it, then.” “I’ll go and see her every Sunday.” “Her husband won’t like that.” “That’s all right. He’ll understand. I’ll find her a kind husband.” “He won’t stay that way. I’ll encourage him to be cruel and mean. You must encourage him, too — to have affairs and drink. If you meet any beautiful women, you mustn’t keep them for yourself. Send them over, lots of them, to him, just like the sugar. She won’t get any sympathy when she comes over to complain. I’ll show her my body. ‘Look!’ I’ll tell her: ‘Look at what your father does to me. I can bear it, and so should you!

There was love in the home. We just didn’t express it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I became a bit detached. When I was four, my nursery school teacher apparently told my parents, “David doesn’t always play with the other children. A lot of the time he stands off to the side and observes them.” Whether it was nature or nurture, a certain aloofness became part of my personality. By high school I had taken up long-term residency inside my own head. I felt most alive when I was engaged in the solitary business of writing. Junior year I wanted to date a woman named Bernice. But after doing some intel gathering, I discovered she wanted to go out with another guy. I was shocked. I remember telling myself, “What is she thinking? I write way better than that guy!” It’s quite possible that I had a somewhat constrained view of how social life worked for most people.

Thanks, Mom, Peter said to himself as he put down the phone. He hadn’t spoken to his mother in over fifteen years, not since she had caught on to the fact that he’d been using forged checks to take money from her account. That tardy discovery had come years after he’d forged her name to countless excuses and permission slips all through junior high and high school. When the subject of families came up, he usually told people that his mother bounced back and forth between her condo in Florida and her home in upstate New York. That wasn’t true, of course. She’d been dead for a long time. He’d seen to it.

At the suggestion of Congressman Clyburn, I visited J. V. Martin Junior High School, a largely Black public school in the rural town of Dillon in the northeastern section of the state. Part of the building had been constructed in 1896, just thirty years after the Civil War, and if repairs had been made over the decades, you couldn’t tell. Crumbling walls. Busted plumbing. Cracked windows. Dank, unlit halls. A coal furnace in the basement still used to heat the building. Leaving the school, I alternated between feeling downcast and freshly motivated: What message had generations of boys and girls received as they arrived at this school each day except for the certainty that, to those in power, they did not matter; that whatever was meant by the American Dream, it wasn’t meant for them?

June. Somehow the message had gone out to all the teachers that the last two weeks of school were the last opportunity to bury the students of Washington Irving junior High in work. Every other school in the country was getting ready for campouts and parties to celebrate the end of the year. But not us.

A group of researchers asked ninety-nine college freshmen and sophomores to think back a few years and recall the grades they had received for high school classes in math, science, history, foreign language study, and English.44 The students had no incentive to lie because they were told that their recollections would be checked against their high school registrars’ records, and indeed all signed forms giving their permission. Altogether, the researchers checked on the students’ memories of 3,220 grades. A funny thing happened. You’d think that the handful of years that had passed would have had a big effect on the students’ grade recall, but they didn’t. The intervening years didn’t seem to affect the students’ memories very much at all—they remembered their grades from their freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior years all with the same accuracy, about 70 percent. And yet there were memory holes. What made the students forget? It was not the haze of years but the haze of poor performance: their accuracy of recall declined steadily from 89 percent for A’s to 64 percent for B’s, 51 percent for C’s, and 29 percent for D’s. So if you are ever depressed over being given a bad evaluation, cheer up. Chances are, if you just wait long enough, it’ll improve.

If I were to ask you about let’s say coaching a high school football team for your local high school and told you the only time you were needed to be there as coach, was on game day. That is right no practice during the week, just take the team and win is all we ask. How do I prepare them if I cannot practice you ask? Well sir they have been trained and practiced in their freshman, sophomore and junior years. You will be the varsity coach and the team knows the game and how it’s played, all you need to do is set up the game plan on game day and organize your team so they win! Ludicrous! How can I be expected to develop the cohesion necessary to put a winning team on the field, without practice, despite their prior training and the three-plus years’ experience? Yes it is ludicrous. Yet this is exactly what we expect of law enforcement, security personnel and other first responders tasked with responding to and winning in crisis situations.

Junior year of high school. Ask Mom and Dad what they did yesterday, they won’t remember. Ask them about anything from his youth, and it’s like they studied replays at night. He held up his hands in mock surrender. “Got me.

I was a nine-year-old baseball player for my hometown team, and I distinctly remember my coach telling me, “Walk it off … don’t sit down it will stiffen up … keep moving it.” I heard similar orders given to myself, teammates, and rivals more than one-hundred times during my childhood athletic career. Not once did I ever hear anyone suggest putting ice on damaged tissue. Indeed, even when I was the starting quarterback on my junior high-school’s football team, I never saw anyone iced or heard about anyone icing.

Build a foundation for continuous growth What matters, then, is having a good education, good work habits, and a good attitude that gives you a foundation to build on. Popularity is about wanting people to like you, but happiness is about liking yourself. In most schools, the science fair is not the most popular event. Being in the math club isn’t nearly as cool as being on the football team. Some of my friends made fun of people on the debate team. But now they work for people who were on the debate team. Junior high and high school are critical times in our lives and our formative years. There’s so much emphasis on sports and not enough on studies. I love sports. I played sports growing up, still do. They teach discipline and teamwork and perseverance, and that’s all great. But we need to keep sports in perspective. Most of us are not going to play sports for a living. One in one million kids will play professional basketball. I don’t mean to depress you, but if you’re white it’s one in five million! The average professional football career is three and a half years. Even if you do make it, you still need a good foundation for life after football. When you study and learn, and take school seriously you may be called a bookworm, a geek, or a nerd, but don’t worry about those names. In a few years you’ll be called the boss. You’ll be called CEO, president, senator, pastor, or doctor. Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Harvey Firestone had summer homes next to each other in Florida. They were close friends and spent much of their summers together. Who you associate with makes a difference in how far you go in life. If your friends are Larry, Curly, and Moe, you may have fun, but you may not be going anywhere. The scripture says, “We should redeem the time.” You need to see time as a gift. God has given us 86,400 seconds each today.

By the end of this episode, Angel can laugh at himself a little and make an admission: Buffy: “Love makes you do the wacky.” Angel: “What?” Buffy: “Crazy stuff.” Angel: “Oh. Crazy like a 241-year-old being jealous of a high school junior?” Buffy: “Are you fessing up?” Angel: “I thought about it. Maybe he bothers me a little.” Buffy: “I don’t love Xander.” Angel: “But he’s in your life. He gets to be there when I can’t. Take your classes, eat your food, hear your jokes and complaints. He gets to see you in the sunlight.” Buffy: “I don’t look that good in direct light.” Angel: “It’ll be morning soon.” Buffy: “I should probably go….I could walk you home.” —“SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED

For almost a century, the school had been home to creative geniuses, radical thinkers, and innovators. Ellingham had no application, no list of requirements, no instructions other than, "If you would like to be considered for Ellingham Academy, please get in touch." That was it. One simple sentence that drove every high-flying student frantic. What did they want? What were they looking for? This was like a riddle from a fantasy story or fairy tale - something the wizard makes you do before you are allowed into the Cave of Secrets. Applications were supposed to be rigid lists of requirements and test scores and essays and recommendations and maybe a blood sample and a few bars from a popular musical. Not Elllingham. Just knock on the door. Just knock on the door in the special, correct way they would not describe. You just had to get in touch with something. They looked for a spark. If they saw such a spark in you, you could be one of the fifty students they took each year. The program was only two years long, just the junior and senior years of high school. There were no tuition fees. If you got in, it was free. You just had to get in.

I knew this trailer park well. It was a part of my childhood. I came to a stop in front of Beaus’ trailer. It would be easier to believe that this was the alcohol talking, but I knew it wasn’t. We hadn’t been alone in over four years. Since the moment I became Sawyer’s girlfriend, our relationship had changed. I took a deep breath, then turned to look at Beau. “I never talk in class. Not to anyone but the teacher. You never talk to me at lunch, so I have no reason to look your way. Attracting your attention leads to you making fun of me. And, at the field, I’m not looking at you with disgust. I’m looking at Nicole with disgust. You could really do much better than her.” I stopped myself before I said anything stupid. He tilted his head to the side as if studying me. “You don’t like Nicole much, do you? You don’t have to worry about her hang-up with Sawyer. He knows what he’s got, and he isn’t going to mess it up. Nicole can’t compete with you.” Nicole had a thing for Sawyer? She was normally mauling Beau. I’d never picked up on her liking Sawyer. I knew they’d been an item in seventh grade for, like, a couple of weeks, but that was junior high school. It didn’t really count. Besides, she was with Beau. Why would she be interested in anyone else? “I didn’t know she liked Sawyer,” I replied, still not sure I believed him. Sawyer was so not her type. “You sound surprised,” Beau replied. “Well, I am, actually. I mean, she has you. Why does she want Sawyer?” A pleased smile touched his lips making his hazel eyes light up. I realized I hadn’t exactly meant to say something that he could misconstrue in the way he was obviously doing. He reached for the door handle before pausing and glancing back at me. “I didn’t know my teasing bothered you, Ash. I’ll stop.” That hadn’t been what I was expecting him to say. Unable to think of a response, I sat there holding his gaze. “I’ll get your car switched back before your parents see my truck at your house in the morning.” He stepped out of the truck, and I watched him walk toward the door of his trailer with one of the sexiest swaggers known to man. Beau and I had needed to have that talk, even if my imagination was going to go wild for a while, where he was concerned. My secret attraction to the town’s bad boy had to remain a secret. The next morning, I found my car parked in the driveway, as promised, with a note wedged under the windshield wipers. I reached for it, and a small smile touched my lips. “Thanks for last night. I’ve missed you.” He had simply sighed it “B.

That June, in the summer before my senior year in high school, I reported to Scripps as a junior trainee for a series of three excursions. I celebrated my 17th birthday at sea. Our initial work was part of a study looking at why sardines—immortalized in John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row—had disappeared off the California coast.

Dear Reader: In Stacey and the Bad Girls, Stacey and her friends get into big trouble when they go to a concert. I never went to a concert when I was Stacey’s age. Instead, I went to my first concert when I was a junior in high school — almost seventeen years old. I went to hear a local group called Bop Shoo Bop that played 1950s doo-wop music. This was the early 1970s, when the TV show Happy Days was popular. My friend Beth was old enough to drive, so she drove us and a group of friends. Our parents knew what we were doing, of course, and nothing like what happened to Stacey happened to us at the concert. We just wanted to enjoy the music and have a good time. And that’s what we did. I’ve been to a number of concerts since