My Favorite Class
Though I wound up going into the world of literature and media for my college education, I always feel a tinge of sadness that I never pursued science any further. I wasn’t the best at the actual experiments, namely because I lacked the slow discipline to prove it right. Deep down I believe that the truth can be born out of logic, reason, and argument, which often lead to a lack of patience in proving an experiment. Few things ran my imagination as wild as science though. In some forms, it is the path of proof and causality, distilling the complex in to smaller more digestible forms and figuring out how they fit together and why they worked; in others is it an attempt to take that causality and put it into reverse, an act of alchemy to create a new creation from pre-existing elements to form a new substance or elicit a combined effect from the properties of select items. Some studies deducing the explosive reaction of a new element to a set of preexisting life forms. Others are fueled by the desire of creation, to figure out a riddle before the riddle changes life permanently. The former is a practice of slow, determined, and calculated moves, where the end result can take years. The latter can take lifetimes, for sure, but there is also the promise of an almost divine conception, where a simple change of ingredients (often accidental) can spawn something that changes the world forever.
Science is actually the most basic of all studies and the most impossibly difficult at the same time, the paradox stemming from the fact that once the answer is discovered, it’s remarkably easy to figure out why. Getting there can be impossible. Science can (and hopefully will) cure AIDS, allow us travel to other galaxies, and endow us with the ability to live in our 18 year old body form forever. Getting there is the hard part, because the path is unknown. When you connect a certain filament to a power source you get light, it’s figuring out which filament and perfect environment that’s the hard part
Its no mystery then, since I was more inclined to, and would pursue, the creative path; I always was fascinated by the latter practice. I’d rather paint my own picture than connect the dots.
This is not to say I did not love the deduction side of science, and the known results. Not only do the known results hold the proofs to build theories like evolution, space-time, and existence in some form or another, but science lets you know other little marvels that history has already revealed, like that when anything in the sodium family (the first column of the periodic table) touches water, sparks literally fly.
It was my tenth grade chemistry class. It covered the basic and introductory teachings of the practice of combination.
Our teacher, Ms. Doepken, was a graduate student fresh out of her academic course. She was a mere 25, and was bright eyed and excited about her new prospects. Though this was not her final stop in her career, this was certainly one she didn’t think she’d despise. She was intelligent too. Not just book smart, but street smart as well.
She was also the speech and debate coach, and me in my theatrical personality joined to handle the radio section. (it was pretty much me ad libbing the news. I loved it, I could do jokes and get college resume stuffing. I once did a live interview with Harry Caray and myself, and a news brief that essentially turned into me doing the hindenburg crash. Oh the humanity indeed.) This allowed us to get another, non teacher side of her personality, and was genuinely affable about the whole thing, telling us stories and showing us a human side.
She had 3 different classes, the 1st and 2nd period class, the 4th and 5th session, and my class, the 8th and (final period of the day) 9th.
Doepken received raves about her first two classes. She was able to handle them without rookie fear and was able to engage the classes in an academic matter by appealing to the students with entertaining experiments in the first quarter of classes. She didn’t simply teach the material, she was able to engage them into learning it. She was hip enough to respect on a social level, and smart enough to command one’s involvement.
The tactic she won over most of the kids with was the mole project. For reasons I have since forgot, there is a shortened term for 6 times 10 to the 23rd power referred to as Moles. It is more scientifically called Avragado’s number for the discover, so why they called them Moles instead Avragado’s (or avocados, everyone like avocados) is beyond me. The project was simply to construct a mole made out of felt and stuffed with cotton and bring it to class.
The other classes liked this, because even though they knew it was stupid, trivial busywork, it still wasn’t a tedious lab report (and who likes showing work, honestly).
But, as you surely have noticed, I have not mentioned my class yet. The short story is we enjoyed these moles (the project not the term) far too much. The long story is as such.
Park Tudor’s 1996 to 1997’s 8th and 9th period Chemistry is likely canonized as the worst collection of students ever assembled in a class in the history of the school. While the worst class is usually cited as the class that smoked in the back of class in our school*, I can’t imagine a more difficult collection of students to spend a year with.
* Mind you this was a private school, where decorum is a standard, and though I am sure public schools have worse collections of bad students who commit bad deeds on far worse levels because they aren’t disciplined, this is a different breed of troublemaking, one made not from lack of authority, but in spite of it.
The class roster:
Brian M.: This was one of the stoner kids of the Junior class. Aside from not really caring, he would actively antagonize the teacher by making clicking noises.
Steve: A kid who was more interested in drama than in the practical works (in this case, he wasn’t gay) who was a Senior, and was only trying to get the bare minimum grade.
Jay (or Dave) M.: there was a set of twins in the year two ahead of us, and one of them was in this class. That I remember, even if I can’t remember which one. These kids were the heir to an airline. They really didn’t care. He would show up late, and best (worst of all) took pride in being a tremendous bastard. He always would ask “Gaslight” questions, ones that drove the teacher nuts and had little relevance on the class, especially since he wasn’t going to use the material anyway.
Casey M.: A kid who wound up dating my sister for years, he was one of the few kids in my year who would pick Pac over Zeppelin. A rich kid who was destined to work for the family business, he cared little about school in general. A good guy, and a fun kid, but he was one of the laid back types who never put much effort into what he didn’t see as interesting.
Wade K.: Casey’s friend / lackey. A goofy kid with a good heart who tried to be one of the cool kids but failed with desperate motives. Smart, but easily turned to the lazy side. He was a stem cell personality. Put him next to a jock and he’d be a jock, a burnout and he’d be a burn out. Fun, but weak-willed. Men like these types as friends because they are loyal, and they often fail miserably in simple actions that allow us to laugh endlessly. At them.
Jon G.: The resident genius of the class. In a year of absolutely gifted kids, he was #3 in terms of brilliance. My class had a kid who went to Harvard a year early and one the national science award, a girl who was the first woman ever to make the national math team. Saying he was #3 may seem like he’s lesser, but in any other school, he’d be the Einstein in a collection of Gumps. This kid was one of my best friends in lower and middle school, but never figured out how to be cool. He had a great heart, but his fatal flaw in High School was trying to fit in with personalities he wasn’t akin to. He was great though, as he was able to teach us information we as 16 year olds have no right to know (like if you light magnesium oxide on fire, it will last for days on it’s own because, being self sustaining as a chemical, it can’t be put out).
Bill N.: The closest thing to a burnout my year had. Smart kid whose natural ambition turned into lazy malevolence about midway through this year. Didn’t care about getting in trouble, but smart enough to raise his goofing off to an impressively destructive level.
The girls: I can’t for the life remember their names (there might have even been three, but they did little). All I know is that there were two girls in the class compared to the 13 or so guys, and they couldn’t care less about chem..
Bobby M. and Brian H.: Two of my best friends thru high school. They were two wildly different kids, but I lump them together because they both: 1. always got A’s. 2. Once every 2 weeks would miss half or more of the class playing basketball and getting a gym teacher to write them an excuse (this was Indiana). 3. Were brilliant enough to get the good grades that allowed them to get away with petty crimes.
Josh C.: One of my best friends to this date. When ever I think of Indiana, I think of him. He, like me, went to college out of state. Unlike me, he returned to Indiana. While he endured cold winters in Maine, I was in comfy California. While he didn't have to live through the recall election that put an action hero in the states highest office, he also didn't get the Southen Cali weather. Which is probably why he returned to Indy and I didn't. But he is what I consider middle America, smart, hard working, a man of great wit, and loving to everything. But as to this story, he was a model Midwestern kid, a complete bastard to athourity. You couldn't hate him because he did good. You just couldn't love him because he was always trying to make the world of a teacher more difficult. On a side note he is the only friend of mince I have ever heard get busy. It was in my friends' Will Z.'s cabin, and in between tracks of Disenegration by the Cure, I heard him and his current (then soon to be) wife making out; and heard the words, "take off my pants, it's ok." Soon after the next man on the list came into the room and put on a CD. When I asked him what he was putting on, he had put on the Beastie Boys, and when the album came on, he simply yelled, "YEAH!!!!"
Brad D.: I have wrote about Brad before. He is one of the most street-smart kids I have ever known. He was a made arguer, and could outsmart most anyone in a conversation. So much so that he had an ability to convince you of impossible circumstances. He once convinced a road trip that markings on bananas were due to a killer named bananaman. It’s not that he was trying to get you in a joke, he just could build up false scenarios so well, you bought them because he was so convincing. He wound up getting funniest kid of the year (I was second) in the yearbook. Just a vital contributor to any class.
Me.: Mirth maker who liked getting good grades but cared more about being remembered than getting high marks. Able to take concepts to even higher levels. A teachers worst nightmare: A kid that respected and wants to please the teacher as much as they want to be liked for being funny and bring the teach down a notch. (This was my “bring them down to my level” phase)
Back to the moles. The other classes saw a project that didn’t involve math. We as a class looked at the project and gave a collective, what the fuck is this. Moles, you want to have us make stuffed moles. While a few of the goody two shoes turned in moles, the rest of us decided against it. Our class participation in this class was probably 70% less than any of the other classes.
But as these moles pilled up, we found we had projectiles to throw all over the place. Not a good thing. Obviously. Brad sat on the right side of the class room and would take any item he could find in the drawers and cause mischief with them. Consequently, this was where the moles often rested, and from his angle in the room, he was in a blind spot to hurl the moles all over the room, and often at poor Doepken. She was at one point reduced to taking a plastic barrier and using it as a shield.
16 and 17 for boys is probably the worst time to know them if you are not family, and especially if you are an authority figure. We were terrible, to say the least. Some of the better antics.
During one of the experiments, Bill N. hooked up a high-pressure faucet to a connector tube. And then connected the other end another high pressure faucet. And turned them on. Poor Doepken got soaked, as the tube began to expand with pure force.
Jon G. home made a beeper with a 10-foot cord activator button. He hid the noise box and every few moments would set it off. This lasted 10 minutes. A few days later she left the room and we found it for later use.
One day the Headmaster of the school made a playful gesture that Ms. Doepken was carrying a bun in the oven. Which she was not. Why she then told us is beyond me. But that day was a test, and she always put up extra credit questions on the board for us. Usually they were 80’s trivia, but this time the question was what two books are on my nightstand. Brad’s answer, “The works of Dr. Spock,” mine was “what to expect when you’re expecting.” In retrospect, nothing would have been funnier than “an abortion packet,” but ces’t la vie.
At one point, we were encouraged to give better names to our lab reports.
Some of the resulting titles:
Equilibria!
Coping with Being an Alcoholic
Burning Dog Poo and the human response
Magnesium Oxide Batteries: Why I no longer believe Jesus Christ is our savior
Some days the class would denigrate into sound wars. Where Steve and Brian M. would constantly make click and clacking noises and Brad would try to drum most of the song wipeout on his desk. One day we started doing car wash in the back of class. I drummed bum-bum-bumbumbabum-bum. Brian H would make the ch-ch-ch-cha-cha-cu noises.
We also had a running argument what the sounds of the coconuts in Holy Grail sounded like and why they needed it needed to be replicate with two hands instead of one.
Though it was a year later, I went into the classroom on a day they were showing a movie. I unplugged the RCA cords and put them into new slots. Doepken went home early, but the teacher giving the class apparently had a fit unmatched in anger for a while.
We drew pictures of the nerdy kids in our year and put them on the bulletin board. Some were blue in nature, other just plain mean. My favorite: Doug Hunt, which was a drawing of the nerdiest kid in our class in a video game scenario where he was shot and retrieved by dogs.
This was one of the first years of calculator games. The internet had gotten to a point where you could d’l games for your TI-82 or TI-85 and we essentially had found a game boy we could use in class. Tetris, Race, and worms were huge, but no phenomenon was bigger than DrugWar (a program I d’ld and spread to the school, a thank you very much). In short, we were one of the reasons calcs were banned from almost all classes.
And so, it continued like this, us trying to push the buttons and extend the envelope.
Now, to the two best moments.
1. Word of the day.
By the third quarter, the moles were locked up and Brad was moved to the side away from the drawers full of goodies. Thinking about good ideas, we came up with word of the day, a la Pee Wee’s Play House. The first day, the word was log, as in logarithmic.
Bobby M: What button do we push on our calculators to make this work.?
Doepken: That’s the LOG button.
Me, Brad, Brian, Bobby, Jon. WOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. YIP YIP YIP.
Doepken: Huh. Anyway, LOG is…
Me, Brad, Brian, Bobby, Jon. WOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. YIP YIP YIP.
Doepken: short for 10 times, ahh forget it.
This continued for a few days, and eventually she figured out that I was the ringleader. Before one class, the following exchange happened.
Doepken: Ok David, what’s the word of the day?
Me: Genital Chafing.
To this date, I have no idea where that answer came from. She said she should give me a detention, but she would have to tell the principal why I was given the discipline. She had no intention of saying genital chafing to her boss.
2. The Inner Sanctum
Being grown adults who chose science as a profession, it is no question that science teachers were dorks in high school. Some of the rooms of the science wing were hard to get to, and were given fun names, the most notable being the Batcave, where the AP chem. class was taught. It was only accessible thru the means of a teacher, which made it all the more mysterious and taboo.
We always pleaded to have class in the Batcave, but to no avail. We told her we already knew where it was, and that it was no big deal. But she insisted no. But Doepken made a fatal error in mentioning there was another. The most secret of all rooms in the school.
THE INNER SANCTUM.
We bothered her for months about this. Almost daily.
So, one day, we are sitting in class for the lecture session of a double period. Bobby and Brian stumbled in 20 minutes late, claiming they didn’t hear the bell in the gym. About this time, Wade put his hand up on to the lab table behind him to help him tip in his chair. The class before us had done a lousy job cleaning up, and Wade got some of the chemicals on his hand. He then rubbed his eyes.
Wade: Ms. Doepken? My eyes are burning. Can I use the eye wash.
Doepken: No. (she thought this was a prank)
A few seconds pass.
Wade: Seriously, I think I may have put something bad in my eyes.
She came over and looked at his hand, which was covered in a chemical that was not visine.
Doepken: Go, go.
The entire class rose to watch.
As the class gathered round the eye wash to see this device thought solely to be ornamental in action, I took it as a chance to find the mysterious room.
I ventured back in the supply rooms, and then I stumbled upon it, a small room which read do not enter. I knew what I was looking at almost as if it were fate.
I rushed out: I found it, I found the inner sanctum!!!
The general chaos with the eye wash and my proclamation could not prevent Doepken from stopping me as I ran out into the hall yelling, “I found it, I found the inner sanctum!!!“ up and down the hall manically.
It was at this point she forced us to do a lab she was going excuse us from doing (we had been good for a week or so), and at this point Bill N connected the tubes and Doepken was drenched. Class was called soon after.
Soon after the inner sanctum incident, Doepken cooled and took a different approach. She knew the seniors (one of the twins and Steve) were going to graduate and stopped trying to make them care about the teachings and worry more about the grade. She eased up her authority, and got us to respect her more as a person instead of an authority figure. She would lay down the line, but did so in a way that we became hesitant to cross it. It was action through inaction; very Buddhist and effective. We wound down the rest of the year, using the ridiculous paper titles to vent our hormonal rage.
To this date, I still don’t think any class has ever had such a terrible collection of students in one setting. It was not that we were all bad kids; far from it in fact. The universal trait every student save Jon had (and he tried to make up for it), was that we were slackers. Not in the purely lazy sense, but fueled from defiance. And while not everyone is the class were friends, we rarely ever fought amongst ourselves. We saw a weakness and we as a group exploited it. The opening presented itself and the class was never the same.
The catalyst, was of course the teacher, who was just green enough at her job to think she had the skills to win, and was not far enough removed from her own experiences to not recognize the cause of our actions.
Maybe I cherish this memory more than I should. And even with 3500 words, I still didn’t really do it justice. All of the stuff seems a bit tamer now since I have been through college, (Halloween on a campus will do that for anyone- the horror, the horror) yet few of the stories me and my friends from high school have make us laugh as hard as those of Doepken. I still can’t stop from smiling when I think that we continued to throw moles at a teacher, or that she didn’t kill us for our drum solos, or that I actually said the phrase “genital chafing” in real life, and I particularly relish saying it to a female authority figure.
I suppose I just miss High School some days. It’s fun to relive it, but I think we are all trying to recreate it in someway, whether to get back or to right the wrongs.
Obviously, I am trying to do the latter. It’s what brought me here to LA, I suppose.
Science is actually the most basic of all studies and the most impossibly difficult at the same time, the paradox stemming from the fact that once the answer is discovered, it’s remarkably easy to figure out why. Getting there can be impossible. Science can (and hopefully will) cure AIDS, allow us travel to other galaxies, and endow us with the ability to live in our 18 year old body form forever. Getting there is the hard part, because the path is unknown. When you connect a certain filament to a power source you get light, it’s figuring out which filament and perfect environment that’s the hard part
Its no mystery then, since I was more inclined to, and would pursue, the creative path; I always was fascinated by the latter practice. I’d rather paint my own picture than connect the dots.
This is not to say I did not love the deduction side of science, and the known results. Not only do the known results hold the proofs to build theories like evolution, space-time, and existence in some form or another, but science lets you know other little marvels that history has already revealed, like that when anything in the sodium family (the first column of the periodic table) touches water, sparks literally fly.
It was my tenth grade chemistry class. It covered the basic and introductory teachings of the practice of combination.
Our teacher, Ms. Doepken, was a graduate student fresh out of her academic course. She was a mere 25, and was bright eyed and excited about her new prospects. Though this was not her final stop in her career, this was certainly one she didn’t think she’d despise. She was intelligent too. Not just book smart, but street smart as well.
She was also the speech and debate coach, and me in my theatrical personality joined to handle the radio section. (it was pretty much me ad libbing the news. I loved it, I could do jokes and get college resume stuffing. I once did a live interview with Harry Caray and myself, and a news brief that essentially turned into me doing the hindenburg crash. Oh the humanity indeed.) This allowed us to get another, non teacher side of her personality, and was genuinely affable about the whole thing, telling us stories and showing us a human side.
She had 3 different classes, the 1st and 2nd period class, the 4th and 5th session, and my class, the 8th and (final period of the day) 9th.
Doepken received raves about her first two classes. She was able to handle them without rookie fear and was able to engage the classes in an academic matter by appealing to the students with entertaining experiments in the first quarter of classes. She didn’t simply teach the material, she was able to engage them into learning it. She was hip enough to respect on a social level, and smart enough to command one’s involvement.
The tactic she won over most of the kids with was the mole project. For reasons I have since forgot, there is a shortened term for 6 times 10 to the 23rd power referred to as Moles. It is more scientifically called Avragado’s number for the discover, so why they called them Moles instead Avragado’s (or avocados, everyone like avocados) is beyond me. The project was simply to construct a mole made out of felt and stuffed with cotton and bring it to class.
The other classes liked this, because even though they knew it was stupid, trivial busywork, it still wasn’t a tedious lab report (and who likes showing work, honestly).
But, as you surely have noticed, I have not mentioned my class yet. The short story is we enjoyed these moles (the project not the term) far too much. The long story is as such.
Park Tudor’s 1996 to 1997’s 8th and 9th period Chemistry is likely canonized as the worst collection of students ever assembled in a class in the history of the school. While the worst class is usually cited as the class that smoked in the back of class in our school*, I can’t imagine a more difficult collection of students to spend a year with.
* Mind you this was a private school, where decorum is a standard, and though I am sure public schools have worse collections of bad students who commit bad deeds on far worse levels because they aren’t disciplined, this is a different breed of troublemaking, one made not from lack of authority, but in spite of it.
The class roster:
Brian M.: This was one of the stoner kids of the Junior class. Aside from not really caring, he would actively antagonize the teacher by making clicking noises.
Steve: A kid who was more interested in drama than in the practical works (in this case, he wasn’t gay) who was a Senior, and was only trying to get the bare minimum grade.
Jay (or Dave) M.: there was a set of twins in the year two ahead of us, and one of them was in this class. That I remember, even if I can’t remember which one. These kids were the heir to an airline. They really didn’t care. He would show up late, and best (worst of all) took pride in being a tremendous bastard. He always would ask “Gaslight” questions, ones that drove the teacher nuts and had little relevance on the class, especially since he wasn’t going to use the material anyway.
Casey M.: A kid who wound up dating my sister for years, he was one of the few kids in my year who would pick Pac over Zeppelin. A rich kid who was destined to work for the family business, he cared little about school in general. A good guy, and a fun kid, but he was one of the laid back types who never put much effort into what he didn’t see as interesting.
Wade K.: Casey’s friend / lackey. A goofy kid with a good heart who tried to be one of the cool kids but failed with desperate motives. Smart, but easily turned to the lazy side. He was a stem cell personality. Put him next to a jock and he’d be a jock, a burnout and he’d be a burn out. Fun, but weak-willed. Men like these types as friends because they are loyal, and they often fail miserably in simple actions that allow us to laugh endlessly. At them.
Jon G.: The resident genius of the class. In a year of absolutely gifted kids, he was #3 in terms of brilliance. My class had a kid who went to Harvard a year early and one the national science award, a girl who was the first woman ever to make the national math team. Saying he was #3 may seem like he’s lesser, but in any other school, he’d be the Einstein in a collection of Gumps. This kid was one of my best friends in lower and middle school, but never figured out how to be cool. He had a great heart, but his fatal flaw in High School was trying to fit in with personalities he wasn’t akin to. He was great though, as he was able to teach us information we as 16 year olds have no right to know (like if you light magnesium oxide on fire, it will last for days on it’s own because, being self sustaining as a chemical, it can’t be put out).
Bill N.: The closest thing to a burnout my year had. Smart kid whose natural ambition turned into lazy malevolence about midway through this year. Didn’t care about getting in trouble, but smart enough to raise his goofing off to an impressively destructive level.
The girls: I can’t for the life remember their names (there might have even been three, but they did little). All I know is that there were two girls in the class compared to the 13 or so guys, and they couldn’t care less about chem..
Bobby M. and Brian H.: Two of my best friends thru high school. They were two wildly different kids, but I lump them together because they both: 1. always got A’s. 2. Once every 2 weeks would miss half or more of the class playing basketball and getting a gym teacher to write them an excuse (this was Indiana). 3. Were brilliant enough to get the good grades that allowed them to get away with petty crimes.
Josh C.: One of my best friends to this date. When ever I think of Indiana, I think of him. He, like me, went to college out of state. Unlike me, he returned to Indiana. While he endured cold winters in Maine, I was in comfy California. While he didn't have to live through the recall election that put an action hero in the states highest office, he also didn't get the Southen Cali weather. Which is probably why he returned to Indy and I didn't. But he is what I consider middle America, smart, hard working, a man of great wit, and loving to everything. But as to this story, he was a model Midwestern kid, a complete bastard to athourity. You couldn't hate him because he did good. You just couldn't love him because he was always trying to make the world of a teacher more difficult. On a side note he is the only friend of mince I have ever heard get busy. It was in my friends' Will Z.'s cabin, and in between tracks of Disenegration by the Cure, I heard him and his current (then soon to be) wife making out; and heard the words, "take off my pants, it's ok." Soon after the next man on the list came into the room and put on a CD. When I asked him what he was putting on, he had put on the Beastie Boys, and when the album came on, he simply yelled, "YEAH!!!!"
Brad D.: I have wrote about Brad before. He is one of the most street-smart kids I have ever known. He was a made arguer, and could outsmart most anyone in a conversation. So much so that he had an ability to convince you of impossible circumstances. He once convinced a road trip that markings on bananas were due to a killer named bananaman. It’s not that he was trying to get you in a joke, he just could build up false scenarios so well, you bought them because he was so convincing. He wound up getting funniest kid of the year (I was second) in the yearbook. Just a vital contributor to any class.
Me.: Mirth maker who liked getting good grades but cared more about being remembered than getting high marks. Able to take concepts to even higher levels. A teachers worst nightmare: A kid that respected and wants to please the teacher as much as they want to be liked for being funny and bring the teach down a notch. (This was my “bring them down to my level” phase)
Back to the moles. The other classes saw a project that didn’t involve math. We as a class looked at the project and gave a collective, what the fuck is this. Moles, you want to have us make stuffed moles. While a few of the goody two shoes turned in moles, the rest of us decided against it. Our class participation in this class was probably 70% less than any of the other classes.
But as these moles pilled up, we found we had projectiles to throw all over the place. Not a good thing. Obviously. Brad sat on the right side of the class room and would take any item he could find in the drawers and cause mischief with them. Consequently, this was where the moles often rested, and from his angle in the room, he was in a blind spot to hurl the moles all over the room, and often at poor Doepken. She was at one point reduced to taking a plastic barrier and using it as a shield.
16 and 17 for boys is probably the worst time to know them if you are not family, and especially if you are an authority figure. We were terrible, to say the least. Some of the better antics.
During one of the experiments, Bill N. hooked up a high-pressure faucet to a connector tube. And then connected the other end another high pressure faucet. And turned them on. Poor Doepken got soaked, as the tube began to expand with pure force.
Jon G. home made a beeper with a 10-foot cord activator button. He hid the noise box and every few moments would set it off. This lasted 10 minutes. A few days later she left the room and we found it for later use.
One day the Headmaster of the school made a playful gesture that Ms. Doepken was carrying a bun in the oven. Which she was not. Why she then told us is beyond me. But that day was a test, and she always put up extra credit questions on the board for us. Usually they were 80’s trivia, but this time the question was what two books are on my nightstand. Brad’s answer, “The works of Dr. Spock,” mine was “what to expect when you’re expecting.” In retrospect, nothing would have been funnier than “an abortion packet,” but ces’t la vie.
At one point, we were encouraged to give better names to our lab reports.
Some of the resulting titles:
Equilibria!
Coping with Being an Alcoholic
Burning Dog Poo and the human response
Magnesium Oxide Batteries: Why I no longer believe Jesus Christ is our savior
Some days the class would denigrate into sound wars. Where Steve and Brian M. would constantly make click and clacking noises and Brad would try to drum most of the song wipeout on his desk. One day we started doing car wash in the back of class. I drummed bum-bum-bumbumbabum-bum. Brian H would make the ch-ch-ch-cha-cha-cu noises.
We also had a running argument what the sounds of the coconuts in Holy Grail sounded like and why they needed it needed to be replicate with two hands instead of one.
Though it was a year later, I went into the classroom on a day they were showing a movie. I unplugged the RCA cords and put them into new slots. Doepken went home early, but the teacher giving the class apparently had a fit unmatched in anger for a while.
We drew pictures of the nerdy kids in our year and put them on the bulletin board. Some were blue in nature, other just plain mean. My favorite: Doug Hunt, which was a drawing of the nerdiest kid in our class in a video game scenario where he was shot and retrieved by dogs.
This was one of the first years of calculator games. The internet had gotten to a point where you could d’l games for your TI-82 or TI-85 and we essentially had found a game boy we could use in class. Tetris, Race, and worms were huge, but no phenomenon was bigger than DrugWar (a program I d’ld and spread to the school, a thank you very much). In short, we were one of the reasons calcs were banned from almost all classes.
And so, it continued like this, us trying to push the buttons and extend the envelope.
Now, to the two best moments.
1. Word of the day.
By the third quarter, the moles were locked up and Brad was moved to the side away from the drawers full of goodies. Thinking about good ideas, we came up with word of the day, a la Pee Wee’s Play House. The first day, the word was log, as in logarithmic.
Bobby M: What button do we push on our calculators to make this work.?
Doepken: That’s the LOG button.
Me, Brad, Brian, Bobby, Jon. WOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. YIP YIP YIP.
Doepken: Huh. Anyway, LOG is…
Me, Brad, Brian, Bobby, Jon. WOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. YIP YIP YIP.
Doepken: short for 10 times, ahh forget it.
This continued for a few days, and eventually she figured out that I was the ringleader. Before one class, the following exchange happened.
Doepken: Ok David, what’s the word of the day?
Me: Genital Chafing.
To this date, I have no idea where that answer came from. She said she should give me a detention, but she would have to tell the principal why I was given the discipline. She had no intention of saying genital chafing to her boss.
2. The Inner Sanctum
Being grown adults who chose science as a profession, it is no question that science teachers were dorks in high school. Some of the rooms of the science wing were hard to get to, and were given fun names, the most notable being the Batcave, where the AP chem. class was taught. It was only accessible thru the means of a teacher, which made it all the more mysterious and taboo.
We always pleaded to have class in the Batcave, but to no avail. We told her we already knew where it was, and that it was no big deal. But she insisted no. But Doepken made a fatal error in mentioning there was another. The most secret of all rooms in the school.
THE INNER SANCTUM.
We bothered her for months about this. Almost daily.
So, one day, we are sitting in class for the lecture session of a double period. Bobby and Brian stumbled in 20 minutes late, claiming they didn’t hear the bell in the gym. About this time, Wade put his hand up on to the lab table behind him to help him tip in his chair. The class before us had done a lousy job cleaning up, and Wade got some of the chemicals on his hand. He then rubbed his eyes.
Wade: Ms. Doepken? My eyes are burning. Can I use the eye wash.
Doepken: No. (she thought this was a prank)
A few seconds pass.
Wade: Seriously, I think I may have put something bad in my eyes.
She came over and looked at his hand, which was covered in a chemical that was not visine.
Doepken: Go, go.
The entire class rose to watch.
As the class gathered round the eye wash to see this device thought solely to be ornamental in action, I took it as a chance to find the mysterious room.
I ventured back in the supply rooms, and then I stumbled upon it, a small room which read do not enter. I knew what I was looking at almost as if it were fate.
I rushed out: I found it, I found the inner sanctum!!!
The general chaos with the eye wash and my proclamation could not prevent Doepken from stopping me as I ran out into the hall yelling, “I found it, I found the inner sanctum!!!“ up and down the hall manically.
It was at this point she forced us to do a lab she was going excuse us from doing (we had been good for a week or so), and at this point Bill N connected the tubes and Doepken was drenched. Class was called soon after.
Soon after the inner sanctum incident, Doepken cooled and took a different approach. She knew the seniors (one of the twins and Steve) were going to graduate and stopped trying to make them care about the teachings and worry more about the grade. She eased up her authority, and got us to respect her more as a person instead of an authority figure. She would lay down the line, but did so in a way that we became hesitant to cross it. It was action through inaction; very Buddhist and effective. We wound down the rest of the year, using the ridiculous paper titles to vent our hormonal rage.
To this date, I still don’t think any class has ever had such a terrible collection of students in one setting. It was not that we were all bad kids; far from it in fact. The universal trait every student save Jon had (and he tried to make up for it), was that we were slackers. Not in the purely lazy sense, but fueled from defiance. And while not everyone is the class were friends, we rarely ever fought amongst ourselves. We saw a weakness and we as a group exploited it. The opening presented itself and the class was never the same.
The catalyst, was of course the teacher, who was just green enough at her job to think she had the skills to win, and was not far enough removed from her own experiences to not recognize the cause of our actions.
Maybe I cherish this memory more than I should. And even with 3500 words, I still didn’t really do it justice. All of the stuff seems a bit tamer now since I have been through college, (Halloween on a campus will do that for anyone- the horror, the horror) yet few of the stories me and my friends from high school have make us laugh as hard as those of Doepken. I still can’t stop from smiling when I think that we continued to throw moles at a teacher, or that she didn’t kill us for our drum solos, or that I actually said the phrase “genital chafing” in real life, and I particularly relish saying it to a female authority figure.
I suppose I just miss High School some days. It’s fun to relive it, but I think we are all trying to recreate it in someway, whether to get back or to right the wrongs.
Obviously, I am trying to do the latter. It’s what brought me here to LA, I suppose.
posted by Indiana at
10:30 PM
1 Comments:
Really enjoyed reading this insightful look into the tiny minds of male high school seniors. As an ex high school senior (and ex substitute high school senior teacher) I smiled my way through it.
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Anonymous, at October 05, 2007 2:53 PM
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