Description:
Pencil on white paper. Drawing of the locker hallway at St Thomas Public Jr. High and High School facing east. The paper is stained with masking tape so I hung this up on a wall at some point. It also has a soot edge.
Story:
When you attended a very small high school there were not a lot of options for electives. In my time the electives for freshmen consisted of Band/no Band and Choir/no Choir. Juniors and seniors could take Chemistry/Physics (they alternated by year) or Home Economics, but not both in the same year since they were during the same hour. Sophomores' electives included Shop and/or Bookkeeping. Neither was required but you pretty much needed to take one or the other or you wouldn’t have enough credits to complete your sophomore year. I had reasons to not want to take either. Regarding Shop, I hated taking classes that encouraged free movement in classroom, because it gave too much opportunity to be harassed by people. I had one classmate in particular that I wanted to steer clear of. I also hated the idea of bookkeeping. It sounded boring. It also involved these long practice sets that were many week projects that had only a final deadline, so you had to keep up with the work and not procrastinate. It was all about self discipline and time management. I was not good at either of those things. We had had a similar home budgeting unit our freshman year in the general business class and that was enough to convince me that an entire year of bookkeeping would be miserable. So I had two classes I wanted to avoid and needed at least one of them to have enough credits to complete the year. The solution was to take a North Dakota High School Association accredited correspondence course. There was a whole catalog of things to take. The thing was you had to pay extra for them. Each course was only a half credit, so to fulfill the credit requirements I’d have to take two. I don’t know how I convinced Mom and Dad to spend the extra money on me. Maybe I justified it by reasoning that they never had to shell out for a sports physical. I don’t know, but that year Mom paid for it. I could have taken a foreign language, but that didn’t really appeal to me. In looking things over and fancying myself an artist, I signed up for calligraphy and basic drawing. Mom foolishly thought that the calligraphy course would help my handwriting be more legible--that was a funny thought.
Turns out instead of a class with two or three month long projects I now had two semester long courses that only had the deadline of needing to be done by the end of the term. It was a struggle, but at least I didn’t have to endure being harassed by classmates, and I was doing something that interested me. I was usually sent to the library to do my course work (another bonus--one of the few rooms in the school that was almost room temperature in the winter.) Mr. Hanson, the principal, was my proctor and signed off on the things he had to. I recall that for the final he sent me to the library to take the test by myself, and then I brought it to the office and he just initialed the form and handed it to me to put in the envelope and mail. The form had him agreeing that he watched me take the test, knew that I didn’t use course materials while taking it, and that he had sealed it in the provided envelope, and would be mailing the test. None of those things were true, which speaks to my squeaky clean academic reputation even though, unlike my older sisters, I didn’t want to take his bookkeeping class.
I have several of the projects from both classes in my box of archives. This was the project for a single point perspective drawing. I left out a garbage can at the end of the hall and completely left out the framed pictures above all the lockers of the composite senior class photos that dated back to the early 1900s. Also the wall on the right hand side after the doorway is wrong. Maybe I was sick of drawing lockers. The lockers themselves are a little off, but I think anyone who went to school there would recognize the place.
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