Missing the Big Picture Read online

  However, Mr. Fuller worked all of his students. His homework usually took an hour to complete. At the end of the first semester, the class had a ninety-three average. On average, 97 to 98 percent of the students would pass the global studies Regents at the end of sophomore year.

  Saint John’s was founded by the Christian brothers, but at the time, there were only nine brothers on staff and only three or four in teaching positions. Most of the brothers were middle-aged or elderly, although one stood out at only being twenty-five years old. The campus minister was only thirty-two as well.

  School was only six hours long, which was nice, but I received transportation from my home district, so its bus would pick up the Saint John’s students and drive them home. On the way back, the bus would stop at another, co-ed Catholic high school and pick up additional students, most of whom were girls.

  The daily bus rides were nothing but negative experiences. Since the ride was a minimum of thirty minutes for each student, most of the older Saint John’s students would sit in the back and torment the other students, mainly from the co-ed Catholic high school. Two of the boys, almost on a daily basis, would walk up to the girls with paper towel dowel rods in front of their genital areas to stimulate erections, and then shove the plastic rods in the girls’ faces. This went on for weeks before officials addressed the situation.

  There was also a girl named Gale who, since she had short hair and wore a tie to school, many of the boys assumed was a lesbian. The boys would call her “Ellen,” as 1997 was the same year that Ellen DeGeneres came out. Finally, the associate principal of Saint John’s went on the bus and said he had received phone calls from several mothers saying that most of the girls refused to ride the bus home.

  In late October, less than two months after I began attending Saint John’s, the school received media attention. On a Saturday night, a Saint John’s upper-level math teacher was arrested for purchasing crack cocaine from a police officer in a school parking lot while his three-year-old son waited in the backseat.1 The math teacher was in his first year of teaching and was only a few courses away from earning a doctorate in mathematics.

  Saint John’s often received media attention. The school was also involved in a lawsuit with a former teacher during my freshman year. Two years earlier, a thirty-two year veteran social studies teacher, who was also the varsity football coach, was terminated for allegedly discouraging alumni from making donations. He sued for $500,000, saying that he was terminated as a result of age discrimination, and that the administration and Board of Trustees slandered him and made comments that he “lost control both on the field and in the classroom.”2

  A week after the arrest of the Saint John’s math teacher, the school had some drug-abuse professionals come to the school and give a presentation about how to resist drugs. One woman came from an organization called the Albany Diocese Drug Education Ministry, and her job was to lecture at all of the Catholic schools in the Albany diocese and provide drug education. In her closing statement, the woman described how when she would tell people about what she did for a living, she would often be surprised that many individuals thought Catholic school students came from perfect families and had stable home lives. As she was making this statement, the Saint John’s students murmured statements of disgust. In fact, most of the students had anything but normal home lives and weren’t perfect at all. In June 1997, it was rumored a Saint John’s student was expelled from the school after it was discovered that he had written pro–Ku Klux Klan propaganda and made racist drawings in his notebook. One of the smartest students in the class had an incarcerated parent; another student was expelled from his public school because he brought a gun to school one day.

  It was very difficult for me to make friends at Saint John’s. From the beginning, I was an outsider. When we were at plebe training, the student in front of me was marching very slowly in an attempt to make others laugh. This irritated me because I had no room to march and the person behind me was stepping on the heels of my feet. I almost fell a couple of times. Finally, I had enough and tapped the student ahead of me to move up. Little did I know that soon after that, we would turn around and that class clown would now be in back of me. He was getting behind my face, actually talking directly in my ear, even trying to bark—not a good way to make friends on one of the first days of school.

  For the first month or so, I continued to hang out with my same group of friends from public school. Toward the end of September, though, I started to have difficulty with them. As a joke, Evan, who I knew from middle school and who had become a close friend of Eric’s, one day started telling everyone that he was going to fight me. When he told Eric that it was a joke, Eric said he thought it would actually be a good idea for Evan to fight me.

  I had never been in a fistfight. Eric was a friend of mine, but he liked to see me get upset. He never fully understood the ramifications of his actions on others. He would always call our friend Dan fat. Dan let him and still wanted to be friends with him.

  Eric was very good at upsetting me. He would tell Evan personal information about me, specifically about my father. Evan would yell in the hallways, “Get a dad,” and he called my mother a whore—after which I punched him in his face. Evan and Eric would make fun of the way my mother looked, how I walked, that I tried to make friends at Saint John’s and went to a dance there, and that I got good grades.

  Finally, after about six weeks of being picked on by people who I once considered very good friends, I decided that I would fight Evan and put an end to this. We actually walked to the woods behind the middle school that we had all attended, and I began the fight by punching Evan in his neck from behind. Then Evan knocked me to the ground and started to slap me before I begged him to stop—which he did. The people I once considered my closest friends, (Dan and Eric), just sat there and acted entertained. I ended up walking home by myself with my ripped jeans and later found out that they went to the mall to celebrate.

  Three days later, Dan called and asked if I wanted to go to the corner store where we used to hang out. I was pleasantly surprised that he actually called me. Since I started going to private school, I would always have to initiate contact. Later, I learned that Dan actually told some people that he hung out with me because I would give him a dollar every time we saw each other.

  So, I said that I would go to Dan’s house and we then walked to the store. When we got there, I realized that I’d been set up—Evan, Eric, and some of their other friends were there for a rematch. I didn’t want to fight, and I left alone, without Dan. That was the last time I ever spent with Dan or Eric.

  There were only a few days of awkwardness between Evan and me. We had all the same classes together, and he apologized and I forgave him. My number of friends drastically decreased. I was shy, and a lot of people just labeled me as a “dork.” I spent a lot of time alone watching television. We had only one television at my house, and when my mother wanted to watch a Lifetime movie, I had to watch it as well. Since I was going to an all-boys high school, there would be some days that Valerie Bertinelli or Jaclyn Smith would be the only girl who I would come into contact with.

  I had a hard time fitting in at Saint John’s. I didn’t play any sports and wasn’t athletic. Not being a jock was the school’s cardinal sin. Many of the students liked being in a small school so that they could get more attention playing sports.

  There were, of course, cliques at this all-boys school. One student who had a huge following was George, a tall African American who loved to create his own rhymes and lyrics. In between classes he would often sing these songs, such as “Making your butt cheeks feel wet, making your butt cheeks feel wet.” He would also randomly say, “I wave my fist,” thereby convincing several other students to start waving their fists, although nobody knew why they were doing so. George also hypothesized what it would be like to have a student who was in a wheelchair trying to march with us. Most of the entire class started laughing as he pretended to be
in a wheelchair: “left wheel, right wheel.” George concluded that if somebody in a wheelchair ever went to Saint John’s, he would have to transfer because everybody would make fun of him so much.

  Even though the school taught Catholic values, many of the students were members of different Christian faiths. Still others were Hindu, Jewish, or Muslim. One student who was somewhat of a freshmen celebrity was a Hindu individual whose parents were immigrants from India. He would often say that Hindus were naturally smarter because they worshiped the god of education. He actually had one of the lowest grades in the school. He was picked on frequently, and in sophomore year somebody stole his math textbook and defecated on it. Luckily, the school reimbursed him.

  The 1997–98 school year was memorable in the school’s history. In September, Brother Anthony became principal only a few weeks before school was to begin after the previous principal died suddenly. Brother Anthony was not a popular principal, and he made negative comments at the father/son dinner in March 1998, specifically about the weakness of the St. John’s academics. The comments stemmed from an article in the local newspaper, the Albany Times Union, which reported on private and public schools’ standardized test scores, specifically, the New York Regents exams. Saint John’s fought back, saying that since 1980, 100 percent of the student body had been accepted into colleges. Some of the colleges that the students were accepted into, however, did not decline anybody.

  Another thing I had to get used to at Saint John’s was the teachers announcing everyone’s grades to the class. The rationale was that it created competition to push students to do their best. I have a few problems with this technique: First, life may be competitive, but once students enter the real world, your co-workers are team members, not competitors. Second, it’s an invasion of students’ privacy. Third, students should be encouraged to do their own personal best and not use others as yardsticks. Instead of helping each other study and do well, most of my classmates wanted to get better grades than me and were constantly asking me about my grades.

  The other battle that my mother had to fight during freshman year was that I wanted to take honors classes. In the required standardized testing, I scored in the fifteenth percentile in the nation. If I decided to stay in public school, I would have taken honors classes, but I couldn’t take them at Saint John’s because there wasn’t enough room; most of the honors classes had over thirty students in them, more than the class sizes at public school. In the middle of February, I was finally advanced to the honors class. I thought this would make my experience better, but on my first day of honors English, Mr. Ramone was late. I didn’t know where to sit, so I just stood in front of the class. One of the students threw a pen at me.

  I finished my freshman year of high school very angry. In just one year, I had regressed from being a happy adolescent with a strong group of friends into a loner who was very sad, depressed, and bitter. My mother gave me the option of going back to public school, but I decided to stay at Saint John’s because I believed the rhetoric that the faculty and students preached that the school was actually helping me.

  At the end of my freshman year, I was very disappointed when I found out that I had failed the New York Regents exam in earth science by only one point. I was usually a good student, with an overall average of ninety-two, but I found the Regents exam to be very difficult. I passed the course, so it meant that I only had to take the Regents exam over again. Nobody even called to tell me that I failed; I just had to wait until I received my report card.

  I decided to take the Regents exam over as a walk-in student over the summer. I just studied on my own for six weeks. I actually passed and got a seventy-four, becoming the first student at the school to ever pass with no formal summer school instruction. I am a firm believer that everything happens for a reason, and I actually took the exam at my public high school. After spending ten months in private school, I started to believe that all the ugly misconceptions about public schools were true. The students at Saint John’s thought that public school students did drugs in the bathrooms, the teachers babysat instead of taught, and the schools were filled with violence. In fact, at the end of my freshman year, my mother and I decided to attend the mother-son breakfast that was a fund-raiser for Saint John’s. We sat with another mother and her son. My mother and the woman soon began to discuss whether tuition was going to increase once the school built a new campus. My mother remarked that the exorbitant price, six thousand dollars a year, was the main deterrent to adequate enrollment levels. The other mother’s response was, “Well, the tuition has to be high to get the right people.”

  So, in August 1998, I was taking a Regents exam at my public high school. I walked in early since I was nervous about being late. I started to talk to other students, kids with whom I went to middle school. All those perceptions about public schools were just not true. I still ended up going to Saint John’s my sophomore year. I didn’t have enough confidence to make the change, so I just stayed with what was familiar.

  I had little self-confidence when I was fifteen and beginning my sophomore year of high school. It was a big year for Saint John’s. After sixty years at its Albany campus, the school relocated to a suburb. The school also bought two hundred computers, which resulted in a one-to-two ratio of students to computers. There were few printers in the school, so very few students could print out anything they found on the Internet. Most of the students used the computers to check e-mails, chat, and visit pornographic websites such as CumTV.com.

  My favorite story of regarding school computers would come a year later, when one foreign language teacher was teaching six classes but only getting paid for five. She refused to teach her senior-level Spanish class, and the students just went on the computers for the whole class period.

  One teacher that stood out to me was Sergeant Carey, who taught military science for the sophomores. The first day of class Sergeant Carey told us, “I am fifty-six years old. Some of you may think that’s old, but I don’t think that I’m old because I can still do this.” He then proceeded to perform a sidekick, and his shoe almost hit another student in the face. Sergeant Carey didn’t even have a college degree. He learned from the U.S. Army all that he needed to teach military science.

  In 1998 it was impossible to watch the news and not see something about Monica Lewinsky and her relationship with President Clinton. One of the students asked Sergeant Carey what he thought about the affair. He said, “I kind of feel sorry for the president. Not many married men are going to say on national television, ‘Yeah, I got a blow job.’” I was laughing so hard that I turned beet red.

  Another student asked Sergeant Carey about his views on gays in the military. In front of twenty or more high school sophomores, his response was, “Before Slick Willy [his name for President Clinton] was in office, we used to take the queers out back and beat ’em.” One student then said that people who are gay could control their libidos. Sergeant Carey’s response was, “How would you like it if you were sharing a tent with somebody and felt a dick go up your ass?”

  In April 1999, after the shootings at Columbine High School, he suggested giving some of the teachers guns. However, Sergeant Carey was one of the most caring teachers in the school. When one student’s mother kicked him out of the house, he actually offered to let the student live with him. Out of all the information that students need to process when they’re in high school, one quote to which Sergeant Carey would often refer, and which I took away from high school, was “KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid.” This actually helped me when I was in the working world.

  Due to the high teacher turnover at Saint John’s, I had several new teachers my sophomore year. For religion, I had a fifty-one-year-old retired insurance salesman, Mr. Bryant. It was Mr. Bryant’s first year teaching, and he had difficulty controlling the class. Students would often talk and interrupt him. One time, Mr. Bryant was hit in the face with a pen. Two fights almost broke out over the course of the year, and there was con
stant trash-talking. One time, a student said to a Jewish student, “Why didn’t you burn in the oven like the rest of them?” Years later I would find out that Mr. Bryant didn’t have a degree in education and wasn’t qualified in any way to be a teacher. He was just a friend of the associate principal, Mr. Ramone.

  One new teacher that most students noticed was the music teacher, Ms. Nelson. She was only twenty-three and very attractive. Most of the boys had no respect for women, so teaching at Saint John’s was a challenge for her. One time I remember a student showed another student a picture of a woman, saying, “I’d rape her.” During mass, students would often roll up their mass programs and then give them to her. She then had to go through and fix all the programs. Another time when Ms. Nelson was a substitute, all the boys farted to try to make her feel uncomfortable. She was very professional and actually handled these situations well. During the next few years at Saint John’s, the music department experienced a sizeable increase, and the number of bands and musical ensembles grew from one to three or four. People used to say the main attraction for Saint John’s was either athletics or the military program. After Ms. Nelson, people now say that the main attractions are sports, the military, and music.

  My sophomore year also saw the addition of some new students. There was one student who admitted to beating his mother over the head with his textbook. He told his fellow classmate, “She was being a bitch, so I had to beat the shit out of her.” There was another who was asked to leave Albany Academy, an upscale private college prepatory school, because he stabbed a student with an eating utensil in the cafeteria. I sat next to this student, Dave, during our class religious retreat. I asked Dave why he kept his nails so long. Sure, I was breaking boundaries by asking a personal question, but I wasn’t prepared for his response: “kids on the bus make fun of me, so I scratch them.” Then Dave scratched me, and I had to endure the rest of the retreat with scratch marks.