My Teachers: Eighth Grade

You know, I’m kind of thankful this picture is a little grainy. This is a shot taken of some of us on stage during our eighth grade graduation ceremony at Harris. Fully visible L-R: Assistant Principal Mr. Lewis Freeman (who had torn a meniscus playing in a student-faculty basketball game to be described herein), Angela, Sean, me, Kevin P., David, Clay. (Thanks for this pic and some others, Kevin)

Well, readers, here again it seems I’m talking about length as regards these posts. I got up this morning thinking this one wouldn’t be quite as long as last week, and therefore wouldn’t reach a level meriting warning messages. I mean, after all, I’ve already described Harris pretty extensively, I think, between the seventh-grade post and the addendum post. But some of you know me—it could still get long. Also, as a disclaimer of sorts, some of the pictures I took of pictures in the yearbook came out a little blurry.

Amy’s right. Enough of that. Thank you for reading.

In the fall of 1989, we previous seventh graders became eighth graders at Harris School. The previous class, almost all of them but with perhaps a few exceptions, went on to be freshmen at Chase High.

I’ll just be honest here. After the whirlwind of change, new environs, and new faces of seventh grade, for me at least, eighth grade turned out to be a good bit less eventful. It’s not that the year was boring or nothing much happened; I think you’ll see that if you read the rest of this. But, far now from being a medium-sized fish from a very small pond that had been dropped in a big lake, I was now a somewhat-taller, medium-sized fish that was accustomed to the lake, and kind of used to being in a class of 90-something people.

Perhaps the matter of my points decreasing from 22 in seventh grade to 2 in eighth might bear that out a little as well.

Since this series is first and foremost about the teachers, let’s jump right in.

I had Mrs. Linda Harton for homeroom. The other eighth-grade homerooms were led by Mrs. Kandace Baker, Mrs. Rhonda Scruggs, and Mrs. Rosemary Smith, who had a combination seventh and eighth class.

Homeroom was where roll was called, standardized tests were taken, organization was arranged, and such. Mrs. Harton was firm but pleasant. I sat beside my good friend Kevin R. all year, and since there was a bit of down time in homeroom sometimes, we and some others made use of a TV in the room (with Mrs. Harton’s blessing) to watch occasional cartoons (Woody Woodpecker and Chilly Willy the Penguin) and such with the volume on low.

For eighth grade, it was back into the A.G. classroom down near the cafeteria and Mrs. Lin Venhuizen again this year.

I wrote a good bit about Mrs. V last week, and alluded to a couple of harmless pranks we played on her in eighth grade. The first happened one day when she went out of the room for something or other. I don’t remember the culprit of the original idea, but someone suggested we turn the lights out and all lie across the flat desks in the small, windowless classroom.

(You must understand that we all had the sufficient quality of relationship with Mrs. Venhuizen at this point to foster such tomfoolery without fear of reprimand.)

When she came back, she smiled and shook her head, turned the lights on, and we got down and went back to work.

I’ve always thought Mrs. V’s responses to our frivolity were quite admirable. To describe the other sort of prank, you must first know that she was a stickler for keeping chalk in her desk and not on the little tray that ran along the bottom of the blackboard. Also let me tell you that, in the late eighties and early nineties, there was a kind of candy that looked just like sticks of chalk. It was cherry-flavored inside.

I suppose you might be able to see where I’m going with this.

My best friend of decades, Kevin P., had a piece of that one day, and, after several of us had discussed the matter beforehand, he got Mrs. Venhuizen’s attention and held up the candy chalk.

“Mrs. Venhuizen, somebody left some chalk on the blackboard,” he said.

“Okay, hand it to me please.” Mrs. V opened her desk drawer in anticipation of a routine exchange, a matter of course.

But instead of handing anything to her, Kevin popped the authentic-looking candy into his mouth and started chewing, smiling all the time. Mrs. Venhuizen’s mouth dropped open in shock, before the entire class broke up in laughter. In just a few seconds, all was revealed (Kevin showed her the box) and a smile returned to Mrs. V’s face. Even though she’d been had, she took it quite well.

For science, I had Mrs. Rosemary Smith. (I think there was a rule or something at Harris that all science teachers had to be named “Smith.”) Mrs. Smith was a good teacher. Once or twice I remember us stepping out the glass door of the room and having class, or at least some of it, outside.

Mrs. Smith wrote the following words in an interesting, bottom-to-top fashion: “Mark, I am glad you finally decided to get your mind on your work. You have a tremendous amount of ability and if you continue to apply yourself, you can be anything you want. I wish you all the best at Chase. R. Smith.” How encouraging to an early-year, easily-distracted semi-slacker is that?

In eighth grade, it was a joy to have Mrs. Murray for Health and PE again. Therein ensued more wiffleball in the gym, basketball out on the blacktop (I sprained a finger catching a hard pass out there that year and had to wear a little aluminum and foam splint for a while), softball, volleyball, and other glorious activities that again got us away from the norm and our blood pumping. Also that year, Mrs. Murray’s classes put out a fundraising cookbook (a novel idea, that). I still have mine, though it’s a little dog-eared after the decades:

Pre-Algebra was in the cafeteria with Mrs. Donna Ko. Mrs. Ko was new at Harris that year, and so was Algebra to me. To give you a little bit more of my opinion of having to do math, I’ve always liked the shirts that say “Dear Algebra, stop asking me to find your x. She’s not coming back, and don’t ask y.”

It’s not that Mrs. Ko was a bad teacher or anything—far from that. She was great, and she was patient. It’s just that, well, you know…algebra.

Last but not least, there was North Carolina History with Mr. Judson High.

Mr. High is listed as teaching seventh grade because he had a seventh grade homeroom. But he actually taught eighth grade social studies. And coached basketball, as you’ll see.

Mr. High was, quite honestly, the coolest of the cool to us middle schoolers. He drove one of the first Mazda Miatas, dressed stylishly, and had cool quotes peppering the walls of his classroom. He kept a game of Risk going on a table in his room that a group of students came to play every day during break. In preparation for our end-of-the-year 1990 trip to Charleston, SC, we broke away for a little while from N.C. history in his class to talk about Charleston and its rich history. Hurricane Hugo also slammed into the South Carolina coast near Charleston in the fall of 1989, and we talked about that.

There is a humorous anecdote from Mr. High’s class. I will warn you, it’s kind of PG rated. I guess. My friend Phil, whom as I’ve said with his wife and our classmate Candice, are our cruising and dining-out buddies, had a question one day.

“Mr. High,” he said. “How many tests are we going to have this six weeks?”

A little explanation is in order here. The school year then was divided into six six-week periods. And Phil, bless him, didn’t pronounce the word as “tests.” He said it more like “test-is.” I think he was just messing around. We could sometimes be comfortably informal in there.

Mr. High, though, dropped his hands. “Phillip,” he said exasperatedly, “I want you to do something for me right now. Get a hall pass over there (they were typically made from discarded paddles). If anybody stops you on the way in the hall, you can tell them I sent you. Go to the library. Get Mrs. Hood and Mrs. Brown to help you. I want you to get a dictionary, and look up the word testes. T-E-S-T-E-S. And I want you to come back and tell us all what it means.”

Phil went. And we all snickered pretty much until he got back. When he came back, Mr. High turned to him and asked “Did you find out what it means?”

Phil nodded, a grin on his face.

“Get over there and sit down,” Mr. High told him. He wasn’t mad or anything, and we all laughed.

“Mark, It’s been fun in 5th. Out of the desert of 5th you made your way to the Oasis of Historical Knowledge. Good luck at Chase. ‘High 90’” My vertically-challenged friend Kevin P. got “Always remember, stagnant air in a crowded elevator smells different to a short person.”

Mr. High also coached basketball. After tryouts that year and when the team was set, Mr. High approached me when I was at my locker in the hall. He asked me if I would like to handle the video recording duties for the basketball team. I said sure I would, and could I have my friend Kevin R., who was good with a camera, to help along with me? Mr. High readily agreed.

We got to travel with the team, always dressing up with shirt and tie or sweater, to various other school gyms, take video of both the girls’ and boys’ teams, and just generally had a good time.

Look at that busy sweater and those British Knight shoes. Man oh man.

Being involved with the basketball team afforded one other honor. That was running the scoreboard for the student-faculty basketball game. I have run boards for my own kids’ high school games over the past few seasons, and I love it. Man, in eighth grade, I felt like I was king of the world sitting at the scorer’s table and pushing buttons to change red and green numbers on that Daktronics board. There was only one problem, though. I had been told to keep a running clock, because we only had so much time for the game. A running clock, if you don’t know basketball, means that the clock is not stopped during dead-ball situations like free throws and out-of-bounds occurrences like it normally is.

But my buddies, sitting across the gym from me in the bleachers, weren’t apprised of this fact and were therefore ignorant of it. The first time the ball went dead and I didn’t stop the clock, they started gesturing to me that I was messing up and pointing up at the scoreboard. And I had no way of notifying them in the middle of the game that I was properly following instructions.

When it came time to go to Charleston at the end of the year, we boarded tour buses and made the trip down I-26 to that charming port city. We walked along the Battery, took a boat out to Fort Sumter, and just generally had a good time both touring and goofing off, staying at a Best Western out in North Charleston along the highway.

Period order that year was Harton/Homeroom, 1st R. Smith/Science, 2nd D. Murray/Health & PE, 3rd Venhuizen/Reading, 4th Venhuizen English, 5th High/Social Studies & History, 6th Ko/Pre-Algebra.

And then it came time to graduate and move on to high school.

The 1990 eighth-grade class of Harris School. Your author is on the fourth row, fifth from the left, turquoise shirt.

I can’t finish a post about eighth grade without saying something about Brandy Splawn. Brandy is in that picture up there of all of us, on the first row, fifth from the right, wearing a lightly-patterned dress (the pattern doesn’t show up in this shot so much, but does in the real picture) and a smile like she usually had. She was on her way to get a graduation dress for eighth grade graduation when she was tragically killed in a car accident in the spring of 1990. It didn’t happen long after that class picture was taken. Brandy was a vibrant, beautiful human being, and the world is worse without her.

One of our pastors at our church once described grief this way: It’s like a ball in a box with a button on the bottom of the box. Right after we lose someone, that ball is huge, and it hits the button all the time. The ball shrinks over time, but never completely goes away, and still hits that stupid old button every now and then. Having lost folks myself, of course, I think that’s a pretty good description. Rusty and Shelba Splawn (and Howie, Jennifer, and Jordan), God bless y’all. We haven’t forgotten Brandy.

Thank you, teachers. My goodness, what a difference you have made. I say it often, but it’s true. Where would we all be, and what would we be without, save for those who answered the call to help, teach, and guide?

And thank you, readers, again. God bless you.