Academics

Some more academic memories from high school:

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Taking music theory as a sophomore (10th grader -- our school district divided things up so that Junior High was grades 7-9 and High School was 10-12) when everybody else in the class was a junior or senior.  I had a good reason fro doing it early, at least: the music teacher, who was awesome beyond belief, was retiring after that year.  I wanted to take the class from him because I didn't know who his replacement would be or how much they would know.

I remember doing a report on the violin, on its history and construction, for some sort of major research paper.

I remember a listening exercise where he had us right down what impressions we got from listening to a piece of music.  I was totally convinced I had recognized it as Tschaikovsky's Peter and the Wolf, so my descriptions were all related to that story.  Turned out to be Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition.  Luckily it wasn't a graded assignment, nor even one where we shared our impressions with the class, because I was quite proud at having "recognized" it.

I remember him asking if any of us had seen any operas performed live, and my hand went up -- Tosca, and La Traviata, "and Phantom of the Opera of course", to which he sort of flusteredly had to correct me on the difference between operas and musicals, and the fact that even though Phantom has parts of several (fake) operas within it it wasn't really an opera.

I remember the AP test -- because this was an Advanced Placement course -- and having to pick out and transcribe the bass line from a given clip of music.

I remember a composition assignment where I had written the melody on one piece of paper, and then was transcribing it to a different piece of paper (within the same notebook) as I came up with the melodies.  We could bring unfinished fragments to him to play on the piano to make sure they worked, and he gave me a very stern (or so it seemed) lecture about how I should do the melody first rather than just letting it happen, and I was very awkwardly embarrassed because I had, it just wasn't on that sheet of paper.

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I remember auditioning for the Madrigal Choir, and not getting in -- probably a good thing overall, since there was a regular choir to fall back to, and the Madrigals had extra engagements as well as having to make their own Renaissance-y costumes -- and having one of the auditioners earnestly explain to me that it wasn't at all because of my disability, it was just that my voice wasn't mature enough yet.

I have, for the record, never developed vibrato -- something I was always told would come when I matured, except it never did -- but I like to think my tone has gotten better.  Less breathy, anyway.

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I remember the person who was chosen to replace the awesome retiring music teacher, and my dislike for her.  She was a nice enough person, but very prim and proper -- there are conductors who use their whole body to conduct, and there are conductors who just sit cross-legged on their chair and make very dainty gestures, and she was one of the latter.  And she dissed "On My Own" from Les Mis, Because Eponine was being all whiny.

(I will admit to having a skewed version of Les Mis at that age -- it was a compete and epic tragedy that Marius didn't love Eponine back, for example, because obviously he should have, just by virtue of her loving him -- but no, you do not openly mock Les Mis.)

(She did, however, let us do the Phantom of the Opera overture in blacklight wearing white gloves, which was kind of awesome. so I forgive her.)

(Mostly.)

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I remember taking AP Politics, and the chance to do basically a student version of city council.  It was a volunteer thing, but I was fascinated to know how stuff worked, so I volunteered.  (Except I lied to my mom -- sorry, mom! I promise it wasn't a frequent thing! -- to the point of telling her it was required, because I was afraid she wouldn't let me do it.)

I remember that we got to choose what role we took, and I had treasurer as my first choice, because I loved math and that was the mathiest thing available; but I also remember that when it came time to shadow the person who did the real version of the job, he grumbled about how it was probably a last choice thing that I got stuck with, and I got all tongue tied trying to explain how I felt about math, even budgetary math.

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I remember the computer programming course I took, and I love the teacher I had because she treated it more like independent study, everyone at their own pace.  There was of course a minimum amount of progression required to pass, but what it meant for me was that I was able to tear through material as fast as I could understand it, without waiting for other people to catch up.

I remember one assignment that stymied me -- we had learned about if/then sequences, and also about for loops, separately, but there was an assignment to print out baseball inning sequences (which was mostly a for loop and printing "nth inning" but with "seventh inning stretch" added) with a single for loop.  At first the only way I could do it was to do two for loops: one for 1-7, break out to print about the stretch, and one for 7-end.  It took me a while, and a lot of prodding, to figure out that I could nest the two: have a single for loop iterating over all the innings, and then an if-then statement that only triggered on the seventh inning.

I remember tearing through Pascal, and moving on to C, and discovering that I loved programming.  I'd forgotten about turtle logo; I'd forgotten about the books I had that involved doing simple code bits in BASIC to solve puzzles that let you progress through the story; so it was more of a rediscovery than a first time, but it stayed with me.

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I remember AP English, where the teacher had us writing an essay every Friday during the class.  The topic was never given in advance; it was meant to prepare us for the AP test, where we would have a short amount of time to write an essay on a given topic.  And it was graded according to the AP scale: 0-5, which only the best essays got a 5.

The first Friday of the year was our first essay, and almost everyone got a 0.  We didn't know how to write essays, in my case really at all, let alone in the 50 minutes allotted to each class period.  But we learned, and we got better, and by the end of the year most of us were getting 5s.

It was the best English class I ever had, I think.