It’s been a long time since I was part of such a system, but as I recall, students received detention slips for various infractions. After so many detentions, the student could receive a one- to three-day suspension.
Having to stay after school in tenth grade wouldn’t have been any big deal for me. I was there anyway, waiting for my father to finish his work day and drive us home. However, I’m sure as the school’s assistant principal, he wasn’t exactly delighted to receive this slip for his files.
When the school year ended and the files were all tossed out so we could start with a clean slate the following year, Daddy gave this one to me to keep as a souvenir. See? Those things DON’T go on your permanent record and follow you around all your life.
On this Ides of March, it’s only fitting that I should note that Coach Deerman, who busted me for chewing gum, is the man who taught us Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. And I can still recite from memory:
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones…
Clearly, Shakespeare, too, bought into that “permanent record” myth. Then again, our misdeeds may live on…when we put them on our blogs.
I too remember Friends Romans word for word – it is in my head like How Doth The Little Crocodile, thank you Mr. Matthews. And chewing gum? Really – heck Becks, make your detention count – I got caught skipping.
Instead of disparaging how I spent my high school years, you should be congratulating me for finding a way to combine Shakespeare and the Ides of March, the concept of a permanent record and the evil that men do, and blogging into one legacy writing post.
There’s a little Mean Girl in you, isn’t there? No wonder you got in more trouble at school.
I was just saying that was a waste of detention – if you’re going to serve the time do a bigger crime. I don’t know if you would have made it in the mean halls of Princeton High School, home of the fighting Tigers.
PS I was writing a high school entry last night, I had a lengthy conversation with my very first BF … but it turned out too Mary Sue. Kinda like getting detention for chewing gum 🙂 I KID!!!
I don’t know if you would have made it in the mean halls of Princeton High School, home of the fighting Tigers.
Probably not.
I don’t mean to burst your bubble (gum) ( 🙂 ) but the other months have “ides” as well. Just not as famous as March.
Some teachers STILL give detentions for chewing gum. I was not among them.
I know it only means the middle day of the month, but the Ides of March are FAMOUS and full of PORTENT and in my birth month! That makes them the greatest Ides of all–a song rejected by Clive Davis for Whitney Houston. 😉
I remember in Coach D’s class (the man hates me to this day…with probable cause) we had to memorize a portion of Marc Antony’s speech. We could memorize more lines for extra credit. I memorized the whole damn funeral oration. My single claim to high school fame.
Great picture of your dad, by the way.
I should look and see if it was a yearbook photo. His expression is one I interpret as, I think this is a bit ridiculous, but if you insist.
I hardly think that is your single claim to high school fame. And I have the photos to prove otherwise.
I never thought Deerman liked me, either. That was my awful year, so I’m not sure any teachers liked me. But I know which three students looked beyond my misery and were kindest to me that year: Vic (who was my bf’s nephew), and Debbie B-S and Paula C (who I think were both office assistants for my father–I could be misremembering that).
The following two years were much better, for friends and teachers. But NOTHING would make me relive high school.
Well, I did run 300 laps, certainly a claim to shame/fame. You, Steve, and Peanut R. used to count off the laps sitting in the stands when Coach Stewart would let us go out to the stadium so I could run during Journalism, “Ooooonnnnnnneeeeeee, twwwwooooooo, thhhrrreeeeee.”
I dug out an old annual and that picture is your dad’s from one of them, certainly not his best, but it’s the Mr. C. I remember. Maybe he thought I was a little ridiculous, as many times as I ended up in his office.
The only high school days I’d like to go back and do again, just once or twice, are late summer and early fall Friday nights, senior year. Even now, when the weather starts to cool down in September I say to my son, Michael, “I smell football in the air.” I close my eyes and breathe in deeply the air’s aroma and feel eighteen in my heart for just a few brief seconds.
It sounds as though your first year was the same one as my first year, 10th grade, fresh in Alabama with my sun bleached California blond hair. Ah, to have all my hair again. Nowadays I spend more time trimming the hair from my ears than I do trimming what grows on the fallow ground that is my head.
I think what you say is one of the reasons fall is my favorite season. I love the change in light and that first feeling of crispness in the air. I love the scents of fall. I really love the sounds of fall in a college town with a great football team.
I think I also have an internal rhythm adjusted to the school schedule (from years of being a student and being a teacher) that makes fall feel like new beginnings, chances, and opportunities.
I don’t remember counting your laps! But I do know this. My father would never have thought you were ridiculous. He turned y’all’s antics into stories to tell at home–though I never heard him betray a confidence.
At least they didn’t make you wear it on your nose. The nuns did that in Catholic school. (AND they pocketed the rest of your gum!)
OMG–sneaks! You know they just sat up all night in the convent playing cards and chewing your gum! Sleep deprivation was the reason they were so cranky.