How Little We Knew Each Other

I have written before about how separate the boys and girls were in our elementary school classes but I thought I'd add a further note about that. The amazing thing about SPX school was how constant the group of students in a class was from year to year. Even as Chili went through the great post-war growth period (population of Chili: 1830 - 2010, 1940 - 3392, 1950 - 5283, 1960 - 11237, 1970 - 19609, 2010 - 28,625) our class of '64 seemed to change only by a couple of kids per year. So, we were pretty much a group of 40 or so kids who spent 180 days a year together for eight straight years. The thing that seems so strange and amazing to me now is that there are kids in that group I may never have said one word to in all that time. How could it have been that we didn't all become friends? Sure there were lots of kids who were friends with each other, but how is it that we might have been around the some kids so much and never been put in situations where we worked with them or played with them? It's true that it was a time before the "interactive classroom" and there just wasn't room for us to engage in any activities which required leaving our desks (except maybe individuals at the blackboard) but still, it says something about the philosophy of education at SPX, it was not about social interaction.

Maybe it was just me. Maybe the more extroverted kids knew and interacted with everyone more than I did. It is true that I was quiet and not very social myself so maybe I'm not remembering the way things really were. And it is true that in 7th and 8th grade there was more interaction (for me anyway) than before. But the bottom line is, I can think of several girls and a few boys from my SPX class with whom I may have never had a conversation in all the approximately (8 years x 180 days/year x 7 hours/day =) 10080 hours we spent together in the same classroom.

For me, this screams out for a class reunion, to make up for this crazy reality and maybe to say "Hi!" to people we were too young or too shy or just too goofy to appreciate at the time. On the other hand, I am not a reunion sort of guy. So maybe it's best to just say "Hi!" from this blog to ALL of you SPX 64 classmates along with a wish that we might just run into each other somewhere around town at some point.