This week we continue with stories from my senior year at Northwest High School and Roberts Handicapped School.

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 30 of Contemplating Life.

This week we continue with stories from my senior year at Northwest High School and Roberts Handicapped School.

After the fiasco of taking a freshman physical science class during my junior year, I finally got to an age-appropriate science class with senior physics. Mr. Stan Irwin was once again my teacher and my classmates were very much my intellectual peers. We had a bunch of fun in that class.

The lab work was the best part of course. We had a neat piece of equipment called a linear air track. It was an aluminum rail about 3 feet long with hundreds of tiny holes in it. A blower would blow air out the holes sort of like an air hockey table. There was a little aluminum gadget that would slide along the rail on a cushion of air. It had springs on either end and the little slider would bounce off the end stops or you could put two devices on and they would bounce back and forth off of each other. As you would slide one into the other one it would stop and transfer all of its energy to the second one. Or you could get two of them bouncing back and forth in different patterns. It was sort of like the same principles in the desktop toy known as Newton’s Cradle. I linked a YouTube video of a similar device.

One of the requirements for the class was to do a project that would demonstrate some sort of principle of physics that we had learned. I tried to build a homemade Ohm meter. I designed it and my dad did most of the construction. I had a pointer mounted on a board that would pivot freely. It had a magnet on one end. Near the magnet was a coil of wire and when connected to a battery it was an electromagnet. There were some resistors in a triangular pattern known as a Wheatstone bridge. Theoretically, when you connected different resistors into one of the four sides of the bridge circuit, the current would flow forward or backward through the meter. I never did get it to work exactly right because I didn’t have a good spring to put tension on the pointer.

I inadvertently demonstrated a different principle of physics. I didn’t have a spring so I used stretched-out please of elastic thread that my mother had in her sewing kit. The problem was that the elastic thread wasn’t actually elastic by the definition of elasticity in physics. Elastic objects in physics when stretched out, will always return to their original shape. But when you stretched this thread, it didn’t always go back to its original length. It was an inelastic elastic thread.

I don’t recall what grade I got on the project but it was okay because my basic design was sound. It’s just that the gadget I built didn’t work as designed. This was a physics class – not an engineering class.

One guy built a closed-circuit television camera for his project. He purchased some sort of small electronic sensor and designed a circuit that would generate a TV signal. I seem to recall he got it working. The image was pretty low quality and a bit jittery but it worked.

Another guy made an 8 mm film stop-motion animated home movie. He had these little clay figures that were nothing but a ball with eyes and a mouth. They were pushing around toy blocks to demonstrate basic machines such as the lever, an inclined plane, a pulley, and a screw. You couldn’t tell what they were building until the very end. It was a monument that spelled out the word “Irwin” in honor of our teacher. Although it had no sound, he played music while showing it. It was a crazy song from the 70s called “Hocus Pocus” by a group called Focus. He didn’t have the timing of the animation figured out quite right so the figures moved very rapidly. The frantic pace of the silly song went perfectly with the animation. If you never heard “Hocus Pocus by Focus be sure to check out the link. It is a very crazy song.

I enjoyed an experiment we did with a gadget called a “tape timer.” It was a little device that you would feed a string of paper tape through it. It would print a dot on the tape at regular timed intervals. You would attach the tape to a little cart and string a lead weight off the edge of a table. It would accelerate the car pulling the tape. You would then carefully measure the distance between the dots and calculate the acceleration. At the far end of the building, there was a ramp down half a level. I think it went to the shop department. We took all the equipment down there and ran the cart down the ramp. I also grabbed hold of the tape and ran my wheelchair down the ramp at full speed but I don’t remember the results of my calculations as to how fast I was going.

We also took a trip down to the school auditorium on the stage and we hung a Foucault pendulum from high in the catwalks of the stage and demonstrated that the earth was turning beneath it. Of course, we also did the trick where he would stand a student in front of the pendulum with the weight hanging right in front of his nose and then drop it. When it would swing back again, it had to of lost some tiny amount of momentum from friction and air resistance but it looks like it’s going to hit you in the face.

We did the famous “monkey gun” experiment. The premise is, there is a monkey hanging from a tree. You aim your rifle directly at him but the instant that you fire your shot, he hears it and lets go of the branch and starts to freefall. However, your bullet is freefalling at the same rate and travels in a slight parabolic arc. The bullet will always hit the monkey because they are falling at the same rate due to gravity. In reality, if you were in such a situation you have to deal with the reaction time of the monkey. For our experiment, we had a blowgun with a metal ball in it. There was a switch at the end of the barrel that would release an electromagnet holding a tin can up in the air. When the ball hits the switch, the magnet releases and the can starts to fall. Because our muzzle velocity isn’t very high, you can see the ball traveling in an arc but it always hits the tin can assuming you’ve aimed directly at the can to begin with. You don’t have to compensate for the ball’s falling trajectory.

The experiments with static electricity were especially fun. We had a device called a Van de Graaff Generator. The device is about 3 feet tall with a large metal sphere on top. It sits atop a glass cylinder. In the base, there is a belt on a pulley that rubs against something and creates static electricity. The electric charge is carried to the sphere on top via the belt. The end result is you get a large static charge in the sphere. If your hand is on the sphere when it charges up, it makes your hair stand on end. We even made a chain of students all holding hands with one of them holding the sphere. Everyone in the chain had their hair standing up. I would’ve liked to try it but I was afraid a static charge might blow out electronics in my power chair.

We tried to pull a prank on Mr. Irwin one morning. The class was first period and we could get there about 10 minutes before class started and before he arrived. The Van de Graaff generator was sitting on the lab table at the front of the class. On a couple of occasions, he would write something on the blackboard and you couldn’t see it because the device was in the way. We had to ask him to move it. We used that situation to set up our prank. We charged up the device and then turned it off. Normally when you’re done with it, you would ground it to release the static charge. We had a glass rod about 18 inches long with a metal tip on the end. A ground wire extended from the tip and would clip onto the faucet in the sink at the end of the lab table. We disconnected the ground wire and left it lying near the faucet so it looked normal.

When he came into the room and started lecturing, we were on the edge of our seats waiting for him to write something on the blackboard. It must’ve been a good 10 or 15 minutes and we were worried that the device would slowly leak off its charge. Finally, he began writing on the blackboard and within seconds someone asked him to move the generator. As he reached for it, he must have felt the hair on the back of his arm stand up and realized what was going on. He looked at the class and smiled, “Somebody’s trying to be very clever. I told you not to mess with the equipment when I’m not here. You thought you were cute but you didn’t catch me.”

Then he picked up the grounding wand and touched it to the sphere. Normally as you approach with the wand, a tiny spark will jump. He noticed it didn’t spark. He picked up the loose ground wire and smiled at the class again. “You really thought you were clever didn’t you?” The whole class cracked up hysterically. Even though we didn’t give him the shock we were hoping for, even the failed attempt was a bunch of fun.

Meanwhile, back at Roberts School, things were going rough. It was obvious that morale at the school was at an all-time low. Teachers and administrators knew that neither the environment nor the curriculum were meeting anyone’s needs.

Roberts High School had a student government where we elected a class president, vice president and I don’t know what else. We had the problem that there weren’t enough kids who had sufficient grades to serve on the student council. We propose an amendment that would lower the standards but the teachers were against it. I don’t recall how that turned out.

We brought one of our grievances to the teachers and administration during one of our open Council meetings. As I mentioned in earlier episodes, from time to time we would get visitors in the building. They were either nursing students or special education teaching students. One day there was a guy in the group who stopped by and asked me what homework I was doing. It happened to be French so he spoke a few words to me in French and I was able to reply. He later stopped by to tell me he got in trouble for talking to us. They were supposed to just observe like we were animals in the zoo. During the student Council meeting, I brought up the question, “Why can’t they talk to us?” Are we just some sort of curiosity put on display?”

They said the policy was they didn’t want anyone to say anything embarrassing to us. I said the only thing embarrassing was being treated like animals and that was on them not the visitors. Or perhaps I suggested they were embarrassed by the quality of education we were getting.

You will recall the stories I told in my article “The Reunion” regarding how depressed all of us were in those days. I described a sort of town hall meeting we had to express our feelings.

Early in my senior year of attending both schools half-day, a proposal arose to move the high school program out of Roberts School and into a regular high school. I don’t know if that proposal was a result of some behind-the-scenes activity by my mother but I don’t think so because she knew I was happy at Northwest. I only had a semester and a half left before graduation. I also don’t know if the morale issues I discussed just now were a contributing factor. I have to believe that my success at Northwest did have an effect on the decision-making to consider moving us into a regular high school.

At the time, the only high school in Indianapolis that was completely accessible with an elevator was Shortridge. The school opened in 1864 and was the oldest free public high school in Indiana. It has a lengthy list of distinguished alumni including Senator Richard Lugar, Congressman Dan Burton, author Kurt Vonnegut Jr., and many others. See the Wikipedia article linked in the description.

We had a meeting in the Roberts school auditorium one evening that brought together students, parents, teachers, and administrators. I invited Mr. Irwin to attend to give his perspective on what it was like to have a handicapped student attending a regular high school. At first, he was reluctant to come. He wasn’t sure what he could contribute to the discussion.

The proposal before us was to move the entire Roberts program into Shortridge High School. Mrs. Bartlett and Mr. Price would continue to be the homeroom teachers and in all likelihood would continue to teach most if not all of the same subjects they were currently teaching. However, anyone who wanted to take a class that was lot offered by this special education program would be free to go out into the building and take any other class. You wouldn’t be stuck in a biology class with no lab. You could also have physics or chemistry instead. There would be more foreign languages than just French. There would be advanced placement classes if you qualified. Shortridge had the same teletype machine we had at Northwest and taught the same computer programming class in BASIC that we had.

Although I would’ve hated to leave Northwest in my senior year after achieving so much success, the opportunity to go to a regular high school full-time was irresistible. I would have loved to do it.

Before the meeting, we took a field trip to Shortridge and a student showed us around. We toured classrooms, the cafeteria, the math department with the teletype machine connected to the computer, the shop and home ec classrooms, and science labs. During the trip I tried to explain to everyone just how cool all of this was and what they were missing out on.

For the most part, the overprotective parents were opposed to it. Although Shortridge was a prestigious institution, I believe there was a perception that it had lost its former glory. It was now just another inner-city school with a majority nonwhite population. The parents had the impression it was the kind of place where a fight broke out in the cafeteria about once a week and they didn’t want their precious little crippled kids exposed to that.

Even though Roberts was the most racially diverse and integrated school in the entire IPS system, I believe racial prejudice was a large part of the opposition to moving the school to Shortridge.

Mr. Irwin participated openly in the meeting. I don’t particularly remember anything specific that he said but he was quite incredulous at the opposition to the move.

I tried to explain not only the academic advantages I had at Northwest and could have at Shortridge but I talked about those intangible things I’ve spoken of in earlier episodes. I tried to describe things like the excitement of going to a pep rally or any other kind of school assembly.

For the most part, the students were either not enthusiastic or completely opposed to the idea. They knew that they had it easy at Roberts. They knew they had the teachers wrapped around their fingers. We had that porch that we could hang out at when we weren’t in class and the guys could smoke out there as long as the lookouts did their job.

I’m guessing perhaps 70% of the meeting was about something negative about the move. In the end, it was up to the school administration to decide.

The spineless bastards gave into the pressure and pretty much gutted the plan. The best they would do is that anyone who wanted to go to Shortridge could go and would have absolutely no support other than transportation. If the entire program had moved, I would’ve gone to Shortridge full-time but considering that the proposal was completely gutted, I decided to stay going half-day to Roberts and half-day to Northwest. It was my senior year and I really didn’t want to move. Only two students signed up to go. They came back within two weeks.

Afterward, I had a conversation with Mr. Irwin about the experience. All he would say was that it was very eye-opening. He reiterated that initially, he didn’t know why he needed to be there but once he was, he knew he needed to be there. I asked him what he meant. What did you learn? He wouldn’t say specifically but it was clear he was incredulous at the overprotectiveness of the parents and staff and he understood why I had gotten out of there to the extent that I could. I always wondered if perhaps you gain some understanding of me because I had grown up in that environment.

Many times I’ve done Google searches and Facebook searches looking for Mr. Stanley Irwin I’ve not had any success locating him.

One time, there was another teacher who offered commentary to me about my attending Northwest. She was a very strict English teacher named Constance K. Kochman. We nicknamed her KKK… not because she was racist (because I don’t think she was) but because she was such a pain in the ass. In retrospect, she was a good teacher who was tough on her students because she wanted the best from them.

She chewed me out one day for being lazy. She said, “I found out that you came to the school because you’re getting a lousy education where you were and you wanted to come to a place where you could really learn something. Your mother hauls you over here every day so you can get a quality education and you’re squandering the opportunity.”

I told her I appreciated everything my mother did for me and that I was still getting a much better education at Northwest than I would have at Roberts. But I wasn’t going to bust my ass to get straight A’s when I didn’t have to. I told her I was there to have a normal high school experience and for me that meant studying when I felt like it, learning what I could, and having a good time doing it like a normal high school kid. I never got below a “B” during the three years that I was there and that was good enough for me. I didn’t tell her about my friend Terry Johnson who got straight A’s throughout four years of high school and then died six months later but I’m sure that was in the back of my mind.

I suppose in retrospect, I could’ve worked a little bit harder at Northwest but I don’t have any great regrets about anything I did or didn’t do academically except perhaps the way I looked down on the freshman students who were not up to my level.

I’m still disappointed that I couldn’t communicate to the people at Roberts what it was they were missing by not attending a regular school. The administration wasted a wonderful opportunity to really help my classmates get a better education.

Next week, I’ll discuss more events of my senior year. We will talk about the first three dates I ever had with a girl. Actually, I went on three dates with two different girls. And I will finally wrap up the series as I describe my high school graduation. I’m thinking about taking a couple of weeks off from the podcast after we conclude this series. I’ve been writing, recording, and editing between 2500-3500 words per week for 30 weeks straight and I need a vacation. I’ll discuss that more when I figure out what I’m going to do but this is not the end of the podcast.

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