Word: school
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...were making your brains hurt," says David Mendelson to his honors English class. "That is the goal." He is trying to take them to the point where their heads throb, because that is the point at which they learn. "If the question is easy, I have failed." Maybe high school is supposed to hurt some. That is also why we remember what happens here forever--all the triumphs and all the scars, all the effort to tell which is which...
...there is a secret to running a school in post-Columbine America, it is to make sure the place keeps no secrets from you. Since schools are populated by adolescents--that eager, suspicious, alienated, hyperbolic cohort--this alone is a full-time job. "There are two directions that schools are going in: to improve the climate and build trust, or to have metal detectors and transparent lockers," says assistant principal John Raimondo...
Webster Groves has made a conscious decision to try to control the weather. The school would much rather prevent a disaster than clean up after one--which means that a child who so much as murmurs a threat toward himself or a teacher or another student is immediately under the microscope. But still the tempests come. "Drinking is the biggest problem," says police captain Doug Jacobs, class of '59, "and the parents that allow it." A child from a prominent family has a beer-and-booze party in the backyard while Mom and Dad are not home. There...
...aren't allowed to wear a hat, toot your horn, form a clique or pick on a freshman, all because everyone is worried that someone might snap, it's fair to ask: Are high schools preparing kids for the big ugly world outside those doors--or handicapping them once they get there? High school was once useful as a controlled environment, where it was safe to learn to handle rejection, competition, cruelty, charisma. Now that we've discovered how unsafe a school can be, it may have become so controlled that some lessons will just have to be learned elsewhere...
...once seen as the dumping ground for bottom-end students, is more popular than ever, and most students taking shop today aren't interested in becoming mechanics or engineers. Students of all abilities--mostly boys but a growing number of girls too--flock to this faraway corner of the school in search of less structure and more responsibility, a place where they get to move around and use their hands. "In a lot of classes, it's 'Do this' or 'Do that,'" says Joe, "but in auto shop you know what you need to do when you come in here...