Ninth grade, a bigger world and a clean slate

I will be honest up front: ninth grade was not a dramatic year. No single thing happened that I can hang the whole story on. What it was, instead, was the year the world got bigger, and the year I quietly decided what kind of student I was going to be. So let me walk through it.

A bigger building

Middle school, in my memory, was small. One floor, a couple of hallways, and some of those hallways I was never actually allowed down because they belonged to specific team rooms or staff. I never thought much about it. I just did not go where I was not supposed to, so to this day I cannot fully picture the layout, because parts of it were simply blanked out of my world.

High school was the opposite of that. No off-limits team hallways, no invisible walls. The whole sprawling building was, eventually, fair game, because over four years your classes would scatter you across all of it. Before freshman year even started, they had us come walk it. There was no guide and no real ceremony. You showed up with your class list and you wandered, finding your rooms, learning the place by foot. Somewhere in that wandering I ran into Anna, a friend from middle school who lived near me, the kind of friend you ride bikes with. I had not seen her in a while, and just spotting her there lit up this hope that maybe we would share some classes, maybe even end up in the same seminar.

Seminar, and Mrs. Warren

Seminar was new to me, and honestly new to the school the way I understood it. The district had built this dedicated class, a kind of four-year homeroom, and the idea was that you kept the same seminar teacher for all four years, so that one adult in the building actually got to know who you were as you grew up inside it. Part of that first walkthrough was finding your seminar room and getting a quick hello with your teacher.

Mine was assigned to a science lab, which thrilled me, because I loved science and I had never been in a real high school lab before. Sinks at every station, a fume hood, an emergency eye-wash, all of it brand new to my eyes. I had this fantasy that my seminar teacher would be wildly science-y and we would do experiments in there. That mostly never happened, and the lab benches in the back were basically forbidden territory. But the teacher more than made up for it. Her last name was Warren, and I will write about her properly one day, so I will just say this here: I think I got about the best seminar teacher a kid could have gotten at that point in my life.

Seminar gave me something else, too. Stanley, my friend from the back row of band, ended up in my seminar class. For three years of middle school our friendship had lived entirely inside one room, sitting side by side sharing a music stand, barely ever talking. Seminar was the first place we had actual time to just be friends, and it is where that finally started to grow into the real thing it became.

Block scheduling, and the locker I never opened

The whole school ran on block scheduling, which shaped everything. Instead of seven short classes every day, you had four longer ones plus lunch, and the lineup flipped on an odd-day, even-day rotation. Which meant a permanent low-grade puzzle running in the back of your head: is today odd or even? Most of the time you just knew. But after a long weekend, or a holiday, or spring break, the count could slip, and you would have to ask around or check to figure out which day you had landed on. The classic disaster was packing your bag the night before with the wrong day’s books and not realizing it until you were already at school.

I dealt with this in a way that says a lot about me. We all got a locker, assigned for all four years, and freshman year was very nearly the only time I ever visited mine. Within a year I did not even know the combination, because I never used it. Instead I kept two stacks of books and notebooks in my bedroom, one for odd days and one for even days, and every night I just swapped yesterday’s pile out of my bag for tomorrow’s. It doubled as my schedule. I also refused to memorize my schedule. I kept a printed copy in the back of my bag and, for the first week or two of any term, I would glance at it right before a class ended to remember where I was headed next. I always figured my brain would absorb the routine on its own, and it always did, fast. The funny long-term cost is that I was running entirely on autopilot, location and time of day and muscle memory, never really knowing my schedule. For years after high school I had the recurring dream where I cannot find my schedule and have no idea where I am supposed to be. Of course I did not. I never really had.

Keyboarding, the class I loved too much

My two electives that year filled the required categories, one artistic, so I took an art class, and one computer-ish, which turned out to be keyboarding. And keyboarding, of all things, might be the class I remember most fondly.

Up to that point I typed by hunting for keys and looking down at my fingers. I had watched people type without ever glancing at their hands and thought it was something close to magic, a skill I wanted badly. Keyboarding was where I finally learned it. And I went completely overboard, in the way I now recognize as just how I am wired. I would get to the lab before class even started, boot up the practice game, and drill. And drill. I finished the assignments fast so I could keep drilling. We started having unofficial speed races, the fastest typists in the room going head to head, and I lived for it. I had not realized yet how competitive I was, but that class pulled it right out of me. I got fast, and I have been fast ever since.

There is a small thread of regret in it, which is that nobody had ever told me you could just teach yourself things outside of school. If I had understood that as a kid, I would have taught myself to type years earlier, the same way I would have taught myself half of what I eventually picked up. That lesson took me an embarrassingly long time to learn.

English, and why I can write

The other class that shaped me was English, with a teacher named Baxter. High school English was less about writing your own stories and more about the advanced machinery of the language, and she was excellent at it. She was demanding on writing assignments, but she gave back the kind of notes that made you want to improve instead of making you feel flattened. She clearly cared whether you got better.

That set me up for life, genuinely. I loved to write then and I love it now, and the ability has stuck. People compliment my word choices, my writing, my technical documentation, and a lot of that traces straight back to those years. By college I was taking advanced English and specialized technical-writing classes, and at one point I seriously thought about majoring or minoring in it. I will even argue it made me a better programmer, because code is just another way of composing a thought in a strict, logical form, and English taught me how to compose.

The contrast with math was stark, and it stuck with me. In English you could find your own way and tell it in your own voice. In math, if you reached the right answer by a path the teacher did not want, you got crushed for it. After the math years I had already survived, I knew which department felt like home.

The schedule, more or less

Between seminar, English, math, biology, history, P.E., keyboarding, and art, my eight classes were split across the alternating days. I cannot reconstruct the exact grid anymore, though I have a strong hunch math sat right after seminar, because I distinctly remember loving that I could do my math homework in seminar the period before it was due.

P.E. surprised me. I had hated it in middle school, but in high school I started to like it again. I liked the measurable challenges, the most push-ups, the most sit-ups, my mile time getting faster. I was nowhere near the fastest kid, but I genuinely enjoyed running and being physical. What I did not enjoy was the days they rolled out a team sport. I had played soccer and was happy when that came up, but football I wanted no part of. I did not want to get tackled, did not want to get hurt, so I would quietly drift to the sidelines and throw a ball around on my own. We did tennis at some point and it was fun, though I would not become a real tennis fan until well after high school. I wish that one had hit sooner.

The name that arrived before I did

My brother is a few years older, and he was a senior the year I was a freshman. He graduated in the spring of 2003. We are, and have always been, about as different as two people raised in the same house can be, and I am going to write about him properly another time, so here I will keep it to the part that belongs to this year.

That year he had a car, and now and then he drove me to school. Looking back, those drives were the last real stretch of time he and I ever spent together, and I had no idea that is what they were. They were not dependable. Some mornings he would stop off somewhere along the way and I would sit there watching the clock, a nervous freshman certain he was about to be late. Eventually I went back to the bus, where at least I knew when I would arrive. I will leave the rest of that story for the post it deserves.

What did follow me into the building was his reputation. He had not been a serious student, and he had left a mark on the school’s memory of our last name, and some teachers carried that into how they treated me before they knew a single thing about me. The clearest case was my biology teacher, who, it turned out, had known my brother well. Early on I could feel her treating me coolly, unfairly, like I was him. So one day I stayed after class and I spelled it out. I told her, as respectfully as I could, that my brother and I are completely different people, that I was not going to disrupt her class or give her any trouble, that I only wanted to learn biology and earn the best grade I could, and that I needed us to start fresh, with her grading me for me. I offered to reset the whole thing. I promised her I would do the work and be no trouble at all, and asked only that she judge me as my own person.

I remember that day vividly, because it was the first time I really felt like I had put my grown-up pants on. And I watched it land. You could see it move across her face, the realization that she had been holding something against a kid who had not done anything. It worked. After that I turned it into a habit: any time I sensed a teacher had that predisposition, I would go meet with them early, lay out who I was and what my goals were, and ask them to look at my actual record. Standing up for myself like that, at fourteen, is one of the things I am most glad I learned to do.

Head down

All of this fed one decision. Wentzville offered the A+ program, which could earn you up to two free years of community college if you hit the marks: a solid GPA, good attendance, and fifty hours of tutoring or mentoring before you graduated. I already knew, with total certainty, that there would be no family money for college, and I was still carrying what my eighth-grade math teacher had told me, that I was wrecking my own future if I did not turn it around. So I started freshman year determined.

I did every homework assignment. I did every project. Even once I had started disappearing into The Sims Online, which I was somehow funding every month as a freshman with no job, I made sure the schoolwork came first and that nothing, anywhere, was a failing mark. When I did not understand something, I went to the teacher before or after class, or emailed, and asked for help. Spoiler: it paid off. My GPA across high school was good enough to qualify me for A+, and I did my tutoring hours too, though the mentoring itself belongs to a later year and a later post.

I should also admit the running joke of every one of these school posts. Every single year, I held out hope that Mike and I would finally share a class again, and every single year we did not. We never had one together after fourth grade, because he was already deep in the advanced track, the AP classes, Advanced Placement, the hard math and chemistry and physics. I kept naively betting on world history, or gym, or some elective throwing us together. It never happened.

Freshman year I did not have much of a friend group yet. The DragonSiblings crowd, where most of my real friendships would come from, was still a little ways off. I did not have a license, did not have a job, did not have any responsibility beyond my own studies.

Most of what felt alive to me that year was happening through a screen anyway. My VPR Matrix computer ran hot in the corner of my bedroom, and by that summer the Enemy Territory servers would start swallowing my nights. During the school year itself, though, all of it stayed in second place, behind the grades.

So that is mostly what freshman year was: me putting my head down on the proverbial desk and pouring everything I had into building a foundation. It was a nervous, exciting year at a much bigger school, the first real cusp of growing up. And I spent it making sure the ground under me was solid.