Placement Test

My thirteen-year-old-self sits at the front of the class.  High school placement tests often go off the mark, miss their point, at least for me, because I believe people learn differently.  Behind me, shadows of unfamiliar faces, silent without much inner-recognition.  Some of the people know each other.  Some people don’t.  Snacks for breaks- fruit juice boxes and grammar crackers.  Are the corners of the juice boxes right, obtuse, straight, or acute?  Is through the woods in that sentence and adjectival or adverbial phrase? 

Sitting on the bleachers during gym class, people are dressed to work out with me, awaiting roll-call.  What is under the bleachers?  Where do the volleyballs that land on the balcony really go?  I run laps, almost unable to breathe after thirty seconds.  The lights on the ceiling in the gymnasium flicker on and off.  I see dark spots where dead bees probably remain after hovering above in the summer.  It is December. 

My Honors English class consists of people who talk out loud during class, and those who don’t.  Rows of five desks by seven, consisting of students who had an above-average English score on the placement test.  I don’t know what to think of myself- am I too smart for my own good in five-track Algebra?  Do I really need someone else’s help in Latin?  What will the hypothesis of my Biology project be?

I feel like, for the average person, someone’s way of thinking changes throughout their life; it advances, and progresses.  Times change and so does one’s perspective on life.  I graduated high school in 2003, fourteen years ago.  A YouTube video was recently posted, The St. Martha’s Experience.  St Martha is my old high school.  In the movie, students stroll through the hall, wearing uniforms, a rule I almost never had to abide by (dress codes were the rules).  The choir hits perfect notes, the girls on the basketball team make four out of five three-pointers.  A priest is interviewed, and he says what he likes to learn about the students is: what’s great about their lives, what’s tough about it, and who they want to be.  He quotes a poet, Mary Oliver; “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”  If I knew that answer, as a teenager, or even now, as a full-grown adult, I would have all the direction I’d need in life, all that I want, all that I could handle. 

In the video there is a group of girls walking down the hallway.  A blonde girl in the center has her arms around the others, and they are walking with the camera, smiling.  Students storm the front lobby, a place I used to hang out before and after school.  I have so much in common with them, yet I feel completely different.  I feel, by watching the video, that so much has changed for adolscents over the years.  Is this just me?  Am I an outcast, or has this generation metamorphosed into something different than mine?

As a fourteen and fifteen-year old, I remember that I used to watch the sun set over the football field of my school.  I haven’t been back to that spot in the suburbs, in my life, in seventeen years.  Back in the day, it was heaven.  What goes on there now, during track practice, during an adolescence, throughout a small phase of a possibly never-ending life?