Quote:
Originally posted by SteveDallas
Is this a recipe for disaster, or what??
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"Or what," as it turns out. This was a small school. Each graduating class had between 6 and 10 students for the most part. The year I started 8th grade, the 7th grade was unacceptably large at something like 16 students and was split into two groups, the only grade (the school went from 5-12) to be so split.
Did I become best buddies with everybody? No. But they pretty much accepted me for who I was, and I started coming out of my shell a bit. It didn't hurt that the "jock" clique was all but nonexistent here as opposed to most schools. (There was no football, and soccer and basketball were populated with darn near the entire male population of the place--including, surprisingly, me for a couple seasons.) Even when I ended up in trigonometry, AP French, AP European History, and physics as a sophomore with a bunch of seniors for classmates, I fit in OK. As I grow older and (theoretically) wiser, I marvel that this kind of thing wasn't a social disaster, as it could have easily been. And while I liked the place at the time, I was totally unappreciative of how shocking my acclimatization there was.
One solution to the problem of geeks is to ship em all off to be together, and that indeed is where I was for
11th & 12th grades. This is where I REALLY came into my own as a reasonably competent person. I still cherish the friendships I made there, and it's impossible for me to attend a class reunion (which I attend religiously) without pining to return to North Carolina to be closer to more of my classmates.
(The other place went out of business 2 years after I left, due to financial problems. It's harder to keep up with people from there.)