Solving for X and RR

        When senior year of high school started there were four advanced placement, or AP, classes available. These days there are tons of AP courses offered in high schools and some can even be taken freshman year – so a lot has changed.

          For me, the AP math class was out of bounds because I had been removed from the honors math track back in eighth grade – the AP course was a beginning calculus class, but I took advanced algebra. I don't remember much about it now except my teacher was Mrs. Dye – a different, much taller Mrs. Dye from the one I had in 9^th grade English. I do not recall the class being too difficult, but neither was it as easy as regents algebra.

          The social studies AP class, when I think back on it now, may have been split into two courses of one semester each, (and each with its own final exam!) - and one was economics and the other I cannot remember – but I think we had to be invited into the AP social studies curriculum, and alas and not too surprisingly considering my poor attitude and track record for these classes in the past, I was not asked to join AP social studies. Economics would have scared me too much anyway – it still does. So the two classes I did take were sociology and Russian history.

          Mr. Huen, the Russian History teacher, used to give pop quizzes, which meant memorizing my notes every night, and one time when I did not memorize, I did terrible on the quiz which seemed to delight the teacher – his way of letting me know that he knew I was not absorbing the material, just bouncing it back at him.

          Sociology was a class of easily forgettable material but a few memorable moments. One day while the teacher was lecturing, I put my suede purse on my desk and started playing with the long fringe on the bottom of the purse – eventually I put each strand in a curlicue shape – each bending in a different direction. While lost in my designing, I did not realize the attention I was getting – finally the teacher commented about how beautiful the design was – well I was mortified! I scooped up all the fringe, destroying the pretty pattern it had made on my desk. The teacher was silenced by my totally hostile reaction to his attention – and he went back to his notes. I do not know why I did that – it was too difficult to mutter out a humble thank you – what if he was going to follow the comment with something negative like stop playing in class – then he was not really complimenting the fringe pattern at all and my thank you would have been presumptuous – so to avoid embarrassment in that direction – I decided to preempt him with my own very real negativity. But later in the day, one of the kids in my class, the teacher's pet actually, walked next to me in the hall and asked why I had responded that way to the compliment? I stuck my nose in the air, refused to acknowledge his presence or his question, and hastily walked away from him. Years later I saw this classmate in a different town, in a gift shop of sorts. We recognized each other, and I was going to say hi and apologize for being such a jerk that day back in high school – but he looked away after we made eye contact, and it was clear he wanted no conversation.

           The sociology teacher one day said something about “the wrong side of the tracks” and how those tracks were very clearly defined in our school district. This perked up my ears, and I looked up – eager to hear the teacher make a huge mistake in revealing the wrong side of the tracks to a class full of kids, some of whom might be from the other side of those tracks! (Being from another town altogether, I felt I was from neither side of the Hamburg town tracks, so I didn't have to worry about this teacher's definition hurting my feelings!) Well, there must have been a few of us who looked a little too eager to hear the teacher's observation on where the “wrong side of the tracks” were in our school district, because just before he took a breath to tell us, the same student as before, the teacher's pet, said out loud, “be careful!”

            I was immediately deflated. That classmate took all the fun out of my day! I was so sadistically looking forward to the teacher screwing up big time. But the teacher heeded the advice – realizing at once what he needed to be careful about.

           Shucks – but I guess that encompasses the field of sociology as a whole, doesn't it? – one can say there are obvious lines that define us and separate us, and over time we have gotten better at understanding people and behavior, and we can tell you the where and the why of the wrong side of the tracks, but when it comes right down to it, we can't actually draw those lines after all!

292 20151019 Solving for X and RR