This article was first published in November 1994. It is from the first edition of the 11th volume of The Classic. This article was chosen as a throwback to former student, Dominika Bednarska, and her take on what it is like to be a freshman and adjust to high school life.
Newcomers contend with life in shoebox
Attention Townsend Harris! I am here to speak on behalf of those lost, wandering people you see roaming the halls who keep whining about how they miss junior high school. We are doing our best to adapt to the strange new ways of this horizontal shoebox of a school. However, it just seems somewhat impossible at times.
A perfect living example was my battle with the combination lock from hell. This happened on the very first day of classes. My combination went something like 40 times to the lefton 33.3, 20 times to the right on 44 1/3, stop. After my 104th time trying to open this, I decided three very important things: a) this was all part of a conspiracy to give us freshmen hernias from carrying all our textbooks; b) they were just taunting us with the too-good-to be-true, can-only-be-used-in-the fifth-and-fourth-second-of the-fifth, sixth-bands-except-for-Wednesdays idea of lockers; and c) it was time to go to the crowbar. Unfortunately, the bell rang, so I had to carry the crowbar in my bookbag with the 2000 textbooks and a binder the size of Texas. I now had to walk through the calm, crowded hallway. (This must have been what the World Trade Center evacuation was like.)
My first period was math, and after that I waited for the bell to ring (which, as I now know, would have been a really long wait if I hadn’t decided that calculus is not a freshman course). So I had to climb back up the stairs and back through the bomb evacuation hallways to the wondrous land of bio lab where what is supposed to be dead is alive and vice-versa. Twenty minutes into the period, 1 found out the right organism was dead. (No wonder it hadn’t responded to the explosion.) With five minutes left in the period, I finally got a live specimen, which decided to nap. My lab report was done in a minute and a half on a napping worm. (At least it only counts for 60% of my grade.)
I went through three more periods of delany cards and arranged seating before lunch. I got down to lunch and there was only one seat left, so I wedged myself in a spot meant for Kate Moss, and realized that I hadn’t bought lunch yet. Since all the lunch choices seemed to be more alive than the worm I’d observed in bio lab, I bribed the cook with my crowbar to make me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. This sandwich was on three slices of bread. In my wedged seat spot, I finished my sandwich and discovered I was the only one left in the cafeteria.
I went to my next class where my teacher, like all those before her, managed to mispronounce every name from mine to Jane. Also by this time I had discovered there are 20 people with the same name in the same class, and every time that name was called, someone yelled,
“Which one?” The teacher would stare at her attendance list as though this is a deep and difficult question which cannot be answered by the average human. Then she’d out a last name which none of the twenty people have.
Finally the bell rang. School was over, and this calm World Trade Center evacuation crowd had turned into the Indianapolis 500 without flashy cars. I got on the U-haul with all my homework and went home.
Despite this discouraging day, I have faith that I and the rest of Townsend Harris’ new additions will conquer the challenges of a heavy work load, locks from hell and living cafeteria food because, after all, we all want to become sophomores and juniors so we can make fun of those lost people wandering the halls and whining about junior high.
