I was in school from 1976 to 1998 without a break. I always thought that if I stopped, I might never go back. In those 22 years, there was a lot of academic achievement and in high school, there was a lack of educational achievement.
In Brooklyn in the late 1980’s the “smartest” kids who didn’t get into Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, or Brooklyn Tech, went to Midwood High School. Midwood selected the best students, based on academic achievement, which stripped all the neighborhood high schools of their best and brightest.
As someone who got into Midwood through the Humanities Program, I had to take two years of Latin. Looking back on it, it was a lot of pretentious crap. Latin is supposed to help you study English, but I don’t think anything could have helped me on the verbal part of the SAT. For the first year of high school Latin (sophomore year), I had Mrs. Christodoulou. She was a nice Greek lady with skirts that looked like tablecloths. The problem was she couldn’t teach a lick and didn’t. The funniest part of the class was that we had these old stationary wooden student desks. People from previous classes would write the Latin declension and conjugation tables on the desk. That was a big help for quizzes and tables. Christodoulou figured this out and brought a hand sander one day to school to sandpaper the desks, but she didn’t.
The only problem with having Christodoulou for Latin 1 and 2 was having Mr. O’Neill for Latin 3. Now, O’Neill, he was a weirdo. He wore a suit daily and looked like a cross between Pee Wee Herman and the Steve Martin character in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. He also took Latin way too seriously. He’d get angry if you said Latin was dead and he did this weird Roman handshake, where he grabbed your arm near the elbow.
When it came to grading, O’Neill was a sadist. You could have 25 questions to answer for homework and if one was missing, you’d get an incomplete. As someone who was running down the clock in high school and wanted to do as little work as possible, this was a huge problem. Such a problem that I failed the class. Midwood did have this weird rule that if you pass the second half of a year course, your failing grade from the Fall semester would be upgraded to a 65. Latin 4 would end up being with Ms. Berman. Berman was a little too chummy with the students, so it was no shock when I found out two years later that she left her husband for a student. But that’s another story for another day.
I remember going to law school and not doing as well as I wanted. People put too much emphasis on grades. In the end, it mattered for the first job and never mattered since.
My parents put so much emphasis on my high school grades because as insecure bullies, they saw my grades as some sort of measuring stick as parents. They were so insecure, they felt the need to compete. If I was going to Stony Brook for college and a buddy of mine was going to Amherst, that bothered them.
It’s more than 35 years and no one cares what I got in Latin 3. Except I think my parents still do. Doing poorly in high school was part of the journey, and I have no regrets about how things turned out.
