A High School Epiphany

 

 "Seek, and ye shall find" ~ Matthew 7:7

 

I might as well admit that I am entering the stage of life called "Old."  You may have heard about it.

When you get to this age, you start reviewing your life and think back to when you were "young,"  and the future was so bright you had to wear shades as long as your parents let you borrow the car.

Some things you think about usually involve you doing something stupid, which didn't include doing homework. However, there were events that happened that you still believe wasn't your fault. 

All of this made me think of an incident in my life that wasn't my fault (honest!) and I have sought to understand why this event happened.

As you know, I went to Wheeler High School ("Where The Grandparents Of Tomorrow Are Attending The High School  of Today") and was a student in the "Advanced Grammar" class taught by the old Grammar Hammer himself, Roger Hines.

As a bit of background: Mr. Hines was considered one of the premier teachers at Wheeler, and (generally) only the best and the brightest took his courses.  How I got into this class is a mystery of life since I was nowhere near the brightest and I certainly could have been better.

One day, Mr. Hines was going on and on about how gerunds were our friends or something when something happened.

The bell rang.

We, the students, got up and left the class filled with the knowledge that gerunds were verbs acting as nouns, and with this knowledge, we could change the world or even go out on a date.

The next day in class, Mr. Hines was clearly upset.  

Now, Mr. Hines ran a pretty tight ship, but he wasn't one of those yelling teachers, which were common back then.  

He calmly but very firmly told us,  "I don't know who told you that you were dismissed from class when the bell rang.  The bell does not dismiss you.  I dismiss you. I am very disappointed in you."

I remember thinking:  Cobb County Public Schools told us. The school bell was used to start class and to end class.  I thought it was a pretty good system.

Plus, Wheeler was an oddly shaped school with added buildings like patchwork.  There were basically two ways to get from where Mr. Hines's class in what was called "The Old Building" to "The New Building," where my next-period class was held. 

One was through a small hall that connected the Old and New Buildings. This was where the mass of Wheeler humanity would cram into trying to get to their class before the bell rang. Or you could run through the Smokehole (in the 70s, they let you smoke at school as long as it was outside and on concrete.)

Both could take a while, and you could be late.  If the bell rang for the start of the next class, the next-period teacher wouldn't care that their colleague would not dismiss a class just because something silly like a bell rang and you would have to go to the principal's office to get a permission slip to get admitted to the next class, plus you had to be issued a hall pass because you couldn't just walk up and down the hall like you owned the place.

I have wondered about this event a lot over the years.  Mr. Hines was such an excellent teacher and swell guy that the whole idea that I was part of a group of students, and these were the cream of the crop at Wheeler, except for one, um, notable exception, would disappoint him so much, truly puzzled me.

Then one day, I had an epiphany.

My wife also went to Wheeler and was in The Riff-Raff Class of '79. That was the class in which Coach Diffley gave an obscene arm signal to at a pep rally. (Historians disagree on the actual act Coach Diffley did. Some say he "flipped off"  The Class of '79 while others claim he did the "Bras d'honneur" which is involves both arms and has lots of moving parts. While I am confident that Coach Diffley did the "Bras d'honneur," I'm pretty sure he didn't call it that.)

She said she was in a class once where the teacher said, "the bell does not dismiss you."

Under intense questioning from me (right after: "Did you get Chick-fil-A sauce?") my wife said the teacher who said this was another Wheeler English teacher, and it was in a class taught in the same year and quarter as my Advanced Grammar class.

I came to the conclusion there must have been an English department meeting where the consensus was that these East Cobb brats are so entitled that they get up and walk out of class when the bell rings like hoodlums.

I don't know if that happened, but it makes sense. It gives me a sense of closure and I'm a peace with that.