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.
