Both Sides Now

Ebony Beasley just wants to avoid trouble and to be a success. Politics may just be "whack." Or maybe with classes and outside jobs, these students haven't got time or energy. One student in Koehler's class acted in the school play, "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum." Another's on the school-based management team to earn extra credit. A very few cited softball or playing piano or doing some other activity outside of school . . . when they had time.

They're the exceptions. Uni is the universe for most students, and the narrower they can make that universe, the more comfortable they feel. Luis Llambias, 18, sums up the pervasive fixation with scholarship: "We're pretty academic and we don't really care about anything else. We don't care about school spirit, we don't really care about our clubs that much, except how it looks on our transcripts, and we don't know about the outside world."

Randa and I are doing work that makes sense to each of us; Randa's looking for her next project, the next film; I'm thinking about making a work change, too. It's that time. Menopause alone would be enough. Combined with mourning, it's a powerful combination. This past summer, my mother died. Going through her things, I found my University High School diploma. 1963. I never really knew when I'd gotten out. My photo and name aren't in any of the yearbooks, except once as a member of the Folk Song Club. Randa's nowhere. I think we got out of Uni, and our lives, about what we expected: Holtby's legacy of passion as a conduit to enlightenment, and knowing that if we were to get anywhere, we'd have to keep questioning and not rely on our high school education to contribute substantially to what we would become.