Seventh grade, and the soda machine I outsmarted

Seventh grade was the year the internet finished moving in. By sixth grade computers were everywhere. By seventh, music had gone digital and everyone wanted in. We pulled songs off the internet, the Napster-era way everyone did, and burned them onto CDs for each other. A couple of kids had MP3 players, which felt impossibly fancy, and I was not one of them. The rest of us were still saving up for a CD player with good anti-skip, where “good” scaled directly with how much money your family had. It was the absolute heyday of the burned CD, and none of us had any idea we were standing right on the edge of the thing that would erase all of it. The iPod, the smartphone, all of it was coming. It just was not here yet.

Sixth grade had felt like one careful step into a new world: lockers, bells, a backpack hauled from room to room. Seventh grade was where all of that stopped being novel and just became my life, which made it a little scarier, honestly. The teams reshuffled, so I moved to a new hallway with a whole new set of teachers. The one thread of continuity was band, which still met back in my old sixth-grade hallway, so a piece of every day pulled me back to familiar ground.

Sixth-grade math, again

Here is a thing I have made peace with: math and I have never gotten along. It traces back to about fourth grade, when I never put in the time to truly nail my multiplication facts, and it compounded from there. By the end of sixth grade I had failed sixth-grade math outright. The district’s solution was straightforward and a little comic: you retook sixth-grade math in seventh grade, in a room full of other seventh graders who had also failed sixth-grade math. So there I was, doing last year’s math a year late. At the time it genuinely did not sting much. The room was full of kids in the same boat, and there is a strange comfort in a boat that is not empty.

The exploratory electives rotated again, too. I honestly cannot remember everything I drew that year, but I am fairly sure I landed back in the locked-down computer lab, maybe for the third time. I was not mad about it.

The teachers, in their own words

I have my seventh-grade yearbook open as I write this, reading what the teachers wrote in it, and it paints a clear picture of a kid who was smiley and well-liked and not exactly burning up the gradebook.

My math teacher is my favorite of the bunch. She was quietly obsessed with Obi-Wan Kenobi, and she wrote: “Todd, sell me stock when you have your own company,” followed by “PEMDAS” in big capital letters, because of course a math teacher gets the last word on the order of operations, and then she signed off, “May the force be with you.” She was so cool. And if she ever reads this: I am so sorry, I do not have a publicly traded company, and I have no stock to sell you. I really did try.

The rest were kind in that end-of-year way. My history teacher wished me “best wishes in the future.” The grade’s assistant wrote that it was great having me in class, that I “made us all smile.” My science teacher: “Todd, what a pleasant kid, always smiling, come say hello next year.” My English teacher: “It’s been a joy having you in class. Have a great summer.” Reading them back, I clearly spent seventh grade being agreeable and cheerful and quietly lost, which tracks.

The history teacher who loved Egypt

That history teacher deserves her own paragraph. She was a little older, full of spirit, with travel in her bones, and the thing that stuck was Egypt. She showed us a photo of herself out there, the hat, the camel, the pyramids somewhere behind her, and something clicked. I raised my hand constantly in that room. I do not think I had realized yet how much I love history, mostly because so much of school history is American history, and I have lived in America my whole life. What lights me up is the rest of it: Egypt, China, Japan, India, Europe, castles, the whole wide old world. She was the first person to show me the subject got a lot bigger than the country I was standing in.

Speaking of castles, there was a week every year, medieval week, where the whole hallway got wrapped in paper and every classroom door became a castle gate. You dressed up, and there were competitions for the best catapult and the strongest bridge. It was easily the most fun a hallway ever was.

Band and I part ways

This is the chapter I teed up at the end of the sixth-grade post. After they let the disorganized sixth-grade band teacher go, the replacement was the real deal, a director who genuinely turned the band’s sound around and went on to run music across the district. He was also intense, and very strict, and his attention went almost entirely to the strongest players. I was a back-row clarinet kid who had never been passionate about the clarinet in the first place, and in a room built around its best, I felt myself quietly getting left behind.

So I did the thing you are supposed to do. I asked for a door. I told him the clarinet was not really me, that I played piano at home by ear, and that I wanted to try out for the percussion section he was about to form, the xylophone especially. And I ran straight into the same wall the xylophone put in front of me in sixth grade: you had to already be good at the thing to be allowed to do the thing. I could not, so the answer was no. It never stopped baffling me. I thought school was where you went to learn what you could not yet do, not where you got tested on things you had never been taught and turned away when you came up short. Other kids seemed to walk into those spots with no audition at all.

By the end of seventh grade I knew band was not going to be my path. I finished it out in eighth grade more out of momentum than love, and when high school turned out to require marching band, which I had no interest in whatsoever, I quietly closed the book on being a school musician.

The soda machine I outsmarted

Now for the good part. Somewhere in sixth grade you could walk down the hall and, for a quarter or two, buy a can of soda from a machine with maybe five or six choices. In seventh grade they swapped those out for brand new ones: two identical Coca-Cola machines that I think were some kind of new-millennium design. Each had a tall Coca-Cola panel down the left side and, on the right, a grid of big can-shaped buttons, each about the size of a seventh grader’s hand. You dropped in your two quarters, pressed the can you wanted, and it thunked out below.

I was a Coca-Cola kid, full stop, and the grid had the Cokes doubled up: two Coke buttons, two Diet Coke buttons, then a scattering of other things at the bottom I never touched. Here is what I found. If you paid, then spammed the two identical Coke buttons rapidly, left then right then left, on and off, but never at the same instant and never in the same rhythm, the machine got confused and dropped two cans instead of one.

For two or three weeks this was my quiet little miracle. I would keep my can and hand the extra to whoever was nearby. I would walk up to my lunch table and say, the machine gave me an extra, anybody want a Coke? Somebody always did. It was a great way to be popular for fifty cents.

Then someone asked the obvious question: how do you always end up with an extra soda? And I made the classic mistake. I told a couple of close friends exactly how it worked, and it spread like a grease fire. Within days, kids were streaming out of the back room with two cans each. Being the tech-minded kid I was, I could see exactly where this was headed, so I did something I am still a little proud of: I emailed Coca-Cola, explained the bug, and gave them the precise steps to reproduce it.

They were thrilled to hear from me. They had apparently been watching revenue leak out of these new machines and could not figure out why. They reproduced it from my instructions, and to say thanks they mailed me something like twenty-five vouchers for free twelve-packs. I handed the stack to my mom, and for a good while our grocery trips came with free soda. A week or two later, the school’s machine quietly stopped doing the trick, patched in software or with the flip of some hidden switch, and that was that.

I think about that one a lot, because it taught me two things at once. The first is that a little technical curiosity really can work in your favor. The second, which took me longer to appreciate, is that you should be careful who you hand an exploit to. Somebody, somewhere, was losing real money on those free cans, and the fair move was to close the hole, not widen it. I got there in the end, mostly by accident.

What nobody taught me

There is a quieter thread under all of this, and it is the real reason I kept landing back in math. Nobody ever taught me how to actually be in school. That sounds strange, I know. I went to class. I took notes. I copied down exactly what the teacher put on the projector, word for word. But I never let any of it land. I was, in the most literal sense, copy-and-pasting with my eyes: see it on the screen, write it on the paper, next slide, never look at it again.

I did not have an older sibling who studied, or a parent who sat me down and explained how it was done, so all I had to go on was the room around me. And from where I sat, everyone looked exactly like me: glance at the screen, write it down, glance, write. What I could not see was the other half, the part that happened at home, where the kids who got it were rereading those notes, redoing the problems, letting the material move from the front of the brain to the back. I did my homework, but only barely, only the look-at-the-notes-and-mirror-them version, and then I called it done. Nobody had told me that “done” and “learned” are not the same word. I figured that out eventually, in eighth grade, but that is a story for its own post.

A lonely stretch

I will be honest that seventh grade had a lonely edge to it. I wanted friends badly enough that I did not always stop to ask whether the people offering were good ones. There were a couple of kids in the neighborhood that year who seemed like they wanted me around and turned out to be the wrong sort of company, and we did not stay friends for long. Not long after, they moved out of the district, and I will admit I was relieved. It taught me, younger than I would have liked, that “they want to be my friend” and “they are good for me” are two completely different sentences. I have been more careful about the difference ever since.

Past all that, seventh grade was mostly ordinary, in the good way. A new team, new teachers, a building full of new people to meet. I had no idea, sitting in those classrooms, that the next year would open with something that changed the whole world. But that is a story for the eighth-grade post.