THOUGHTS

Confessions of a Gen Y Kid: Our Education

How public school culture within the 1980s and 1990s prepared me for 21st Century adversity

I’m proud to be a Millennial. I don’t glorify my own generation as “the best.” However, I refuse to lay down and endure the vitriol from people who choose to blame my fellow members of “Generation Y” for everything that’s wrong with society.

But that’s a deep dive for another day (and I will be publishing one of those, soon).

Today, I want to talk a little bit about my experiences growing up throughout the 1980s and 1990s. By some accounts, those decades feel so quaint compared to the chaos of our current era. On the other hand, a lot of social dynamics from my childhood and adolescence were rather backward. We’ve come a long way, baby!

Still, there is a lucid comfort in nostalgia. As long as we keep our fond memories in proper context, there’s nothing wrong with a little bit of reminiscing.

Part of the reason I’m writing this is to benefit “Centennials” and “Alphas” — Generations Z & AA, respectively — who were too young to remember the 80s or most of the 90s. Most of you weren’t even born yet; so I hope this can serve as sort of a “modular time capsule” to give you a glimpse into those decades preceding your earliest memories.

I’m also writing this for GenXers — especially the youngest members of your generation. As for you Traditionalists (aka “the Silent Generation”), Baby Boomers, and older Xers — I’m sure my experiences were vastly different from your own salad days in school. And that’s okay. We’re all just trying to better understand one another, right?

Disclaimer: my own personal experience as a K-12 student was obviously tainted by my limitations when viewing the world through the lenses of race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, religion, disability, income level, and body image possessed by me. For that reason, you’ll find a cacophony of variations of these experiences from Millennial individuals who come from backgrounds different than my own.

I’m a member of the “Xennial” microgeneration, which includes the youngest members of Gen X as well as the oldest members of Gen Y. I started grade school just as the Bush/Quayle administration was about to begin. The Clinton/Gore years spanned my entire middle school and high school duration.

I was raised in a rural Wisconsin town with a population that has always remained below 4,000 people. We had three elementary schools, one middle school, and one high school. Zero private schools. No bus systems — everyone either walked, biked, or drove.

Kindergarten was focused on play and social skills, with some rudimentary math and language mixed in. As a kid with (undiagnosed, at the time) autism, I always lagged behind my classmates, socially. But there were aspects of my early education that I valued.

In the First Grade, I loved the “Superkids” novella/book series that taught us basic reading skills. Our teacher, Mrs. Wenzel, divided our classroom into three reading groups based on proficiency level, and she let us name ourselves: the “Lions” (fastest), the “Tigers” (intermediate), and the “Deer” (slowest).

I was a “Lion.”

Other educational book series I enjoyed included The Nitty Gritty (Rather Pretty) City, The Get-Along Gang (with an accompanying Sunday morning cartoon), and the Sweet Pickles series. I eventually was able to collect every single Sweet Pickles book through local garage sales. Sadly, my Sweet Pickles collection has since gotten lost.

I remember the Scholastic Book Club sponsored a monthly book-purchasing catalogue. We’d order books (for which our parents would give us money), and it was like nine different Christmases per year, waiting for our book orders to be delivered at school. Scholastic also put out a “Weekly Reader” magazine focusing on kid-friendly national, world, and human interest topics. Our teachers would guide us through discussion of some of its articles.

Books were a huge part of life for 80s kids. Who didn’t love flipping through Choose-Your-Own Adventure books in the school library? Or going on vicarious adventures with The Boxcar Children? Or the Cam Jansen mystery series? (eat your heart out, Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys!)

Or collecting stars for every book we read via the BookIt! program, for which you’d earn a certificate to receive a free personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut once you accumulated five stars. I was also into Ann M. Martin’s Babysitters’ Club preteen novels. In fact, my sister (who is three years younger than me) and I had a bizarre tradition where we would read the Babysitters’ Club books out loud, and then add in funny parts (several years earlier, we did something similar with Berenstain Bears storybooks). Demented, wildly inappropriate funny parts based on adult humor.

Computers were just in their infancy. We’d take turns signing up to play computer games inside the classroom (while everyone else was outside, at recess) — with the most memorable ones being Gertrude’s Secrets (a favorite jam of me and my bro, Halvey), Jenny’s Journeys, Odell Lake, and The Oregon Trail. The latter was perhaps the most popular amongst younger Xers and Millennials of all ages…to the point where “Xennials” along with all the rest of Generation Y are sometimes dubbed “The Oregon Trail Generation” (or, as I encourage my Gen Y peers to call ourselves, if they loathe the “Millennial” moniker — “OTGs”).

Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? had both a computer game as well as a popular kids’ game show on PBS. I won my Fifth Grade Geography Bee, thanks to that one. In fact, PBS had plenty of educational programming that kids loved — alongside of Sesame Street, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and Reading Rainbow, there was also 3–2–1 Contact, Square One TV, Let Me See!, Strawberry Square, High Feather, Storylords, Well!Well!Well! with Slim Goodbody…and, of course, the undisputed king of PBS diversity/literacy programming, Ghostwriter.

Once we got to middle school, things changed. In the Sixth Grade, we still had most of our core subjects with the same classroom teacher for the first half of the day (shout-out to Mr. Wester!)…although they’d shuffle us around for Math, with the “High Math” students (of which I was one for exactly one quarter) going to Mrs. Olson’s room.

Then, in the afternoon, we had our “specials” during 6th Hour and 7th Hour. With approximately 150 students in each grade/class, they were able to rotate us almost evenly amongst ten weekly sessions with approximately thirty kids per class. I even remember my personal schedule:

Mondays: Tech Ed (6th Hour), Study Hall (7th Hour)

Tuesdays: Phy Ed (6th Hour), Guidance (7th Hour)

Wednesdays: Library Skills (6th Hour), Music Appreciation Theory (7th Hour)

Thursdays: Phy Ed (6th Hour), Keyboarding/Typing (7th Hour)

Fridays: Art (6th Hour), Family & Consumer Education (7th Hour)

Finally, we ended the day back in “Homeroom” for another forty minutes, and the final bell rang no later than 3:10 P.M.

And yes, we had to take same-sex showers in an open shower room after Phy Ed — which I realize rarely ever happens anymore, in today’s schools. Actually, in my Sixth Grade year, we ended up on the tail-end of this decades-long tradition: we had to regularly shower in front of each other for the first six months of that school year. Then, all of a sudden, by February or March of my Sixth Grade year, they stopped requiring it. I’m guessing the national headlines of ACLU-invoked lawsuits against school districts had something to do with it. By the time we reached Seventh Grade, it was barely ever enforced after gym class anymore…or even encouraged.

Honestly, being naked in front of other boys wasn’t what scared me (I am gay, after all) — rather, it was the fear that I’d get pushed down or assaulted while in the showers. Because, on the playground, I got bullied A LOT.

For social butterflies who had tons of friends, these conditions might seem idyllic. But, for an autistic kid like myself who struggled to relate to my peers socially, the psychological terror that I carried with me on a daily basis was pure hell. I had no close friends…and only a smattering of casual friends, here and there — classmates who liked me, but we never hung around together outside of school hours.

I hated when teachers would instruct us to “find a partner” for classroom activities. Nobody ever wanted to be my partner. Because I was the nerdy oddball, too smart for his own good, who didn’t have all of the “appropriate” interests and beliefs that boys were “supposed to” embrace.

And I absolutely despised recess. Although I understood the importance of giving our classroom teachers some daily breaks from us rugrats, the playground was the perfect opportunity for bullies to chase me, hit me, shove me, taunt me, pull my winter hat over my eyes, and endlessly harass me when there weren’t playground aides around.

And, since a majority of our school’s aides usually clustered together chatting in small groups while only able to keep their eyes on a tiny portion of the yard…it was really, really easy for bullies to get away with targeting me in that manner.

Once we got to the 7th and 8th Grades, “Homeroom” was only for the first ten minutes and the last forty minutes of the day. In-between, we rotated to different classes. Each course had a specific teacher in charge of that core subject, along with our quarterly “specials” (Tech Ed, Art, and Family & Consumer Education; plus, Agri-Science for 7th Graders and Foreign Language for 8th Graders). Phy Ed was every other day, rotated with Band (for the “band kids”) or Study Hall (for the “non-band kids”).

By high school, there was no time in our school day for traditional outdoor recess. We were expected to shuttle ourselves across eight different class periods per school day — dealing with a variety of personalities (harbored by our classroom teachers) ranging from pleasant to indifferent to obnoxious to sociopathic.

All of this against the backdrop of Rodney King, the Somalian Civil War, Lorena Bobbitt, Tonya Harding, O.J. Simpson, the Bosnian War, Monica Lewinsky, and the Columbine shootings.

Say what you will about Gen Y — but, although I realize certain things about me are abnormal (or “unique”), I can’t possibly be the only Millennial who endured them.

Next time: I explore the pop culture that enchanted us Millennials, during the years when our hair sprouted and our hormones raged.

Gen Z and Gen AA — hold on tight for some more history lessons on how adults used to REALLY terrorize kids…

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