Episode 11: Getting Schooled
My first few months of life in the U.S. began in August of 1976, a year of bell-bottom pants, feathered hair, and disco. For me it was a year of some of the most profound changes of my life. Within just a couple weeks of our arrival, I would start the sixth grade at Meyer Middle School, home of the Mustangs. I had not quite completed four years of public education in the Soviet Union, having been pulled out of school in March because of a tip-off by a teacher, who risked his job and possibly his freedom to inform my parents of the assembly being planned where I would be stripped of my Young Pioneer kerchief and denounced as a traitor in front of the entire school. I had avoided this trauma and was, in 1976, oblivious to my near escape. With the help of Frankie, our HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) rep, my parents registered me at my new school, and it was determined that I should be in the sixth grade.
The Soviet school system is made up of 10 years of elementary and secondary education, starting grade 1 at age 7 and graduating from grade 10 at age 17 or 18. This would be followed by either a job or some post-secondary options, such as technical institutes or universities, depending on the career track of the student. The rigor of the curriculum in the early years of a person’s education in the Soviet Union meant that students who completed the fourth grade there were on an academic level similar to students who had completed the sixth grade in U.S. schools.
With a birthday in late October, I had begun the first grade aged almost 8, and when we left, I was 11 and in in the fourth grade. In September, 1976, I was 11, and would turn 12 in less that two months. Had I been a fluent speaker of English, I would have been registered for the seventh grade, but since the only thing I could do in English in September, 1976 was to count to seven (no idea why seven and not 10), my parents were advised to put me in the sixth grade. The idea was to give me a year to learn enough English without missing too much academically, so I could begin grade seven the following year with little to no deficit.
It made sense, though nobody explained to me just how much more than just English I had to learn in that first year, if I were to have any hope of becoming an American pre-teen. The truth of this was made painfully obvious to me in the very first minutes of that very first day of school. The bus stop where I would board the yellow school bus that would take me from our apartment on Gerald Court to my new school was close, so I walked there alone, dressed in my best white pants and bright green button-down shirt. I knew, as soon as I approached the group of kids standing around at the bus stop, that my outfit was a terrible mistake. Everyone else was in faded bell-bottom jeans and basic t-shirts, and I stuck out like some sort of tropical parakeet in a flock of sparrows. I boarded the bus with a distinct feeling of doom.
My first stop after disembarking the school bus was at the main office to meet my guidance counselor, Mrs. Gail. She ushered me into her office with smiles and gestures of welcome, talking the entire time, though to this day, I don’t know what she was saying. In her office, sitting in one of the chairs in front of Mrs. Gail’s desk was a girl. Mrs. Gail pointed at her and said “Shawna,” which I guessed was the girl’s name. Shawna had apparently been conscripted to be my guide and my English tutor. She smiled at me and waved with her fingers, and I knew for the second time that day, that I was completely out of my depth. Dressed in the requisite bell-bottom jeans and t-shirt, Shawna had perfectly smooth, shiny, shoulder-length brown hair styled in a perfect page boy with perfectly curled-under bangs and feathered sides and perfectly white, even teeth. She wore eyeliner and mascara and lip gloss. When she stood, Mrs. Gail having handed her a copy of my class schedule, she turned out to be tall and willowy. She was either in grade 7 or grade 8. In short, Shawna was everything a pre-teen girl could aspire to be, at least physically, in 1976.
For reference, here’s what the 1976 page boy haircut looked like. This isn’t Shawna, just a stock photo, but it’s pretty close to
My first few months of life in the U.S. began in August of 1976, a year of bell-bottom pants, feathered hair, and disco. For me it was a year of some of the most profound changes of my life. Within just a couple weeks of our arrival, I would start the sixth grade at Meyer Middle School, home of the Mustangs. I had not quite completed four years of public education in the Soviet Union, having been pulled out of school in March because of a tip-off by a teacher, who risked his job and possibly his freedom to inform my parents of the assembly being planned where I would be stripped of my Young Pioneer kerchief and denounced as a traitor in front of the entire school. I had avoided this trauma and was, in 1976, oblivious to my near escape. With the help of Frankie, our HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) rep, my parents registered me at my new school, and it was determined that I should be in the sixth grade.
I was a slightly chubby pre-teen with short, messy hair, glasses that completely dominated my face, and one canine tooth that had grown in crooked. And, of course, I was wearing those hideous white pants and green shirt, and not a drop of lip gloss!
This is me in 1976. Enough said!
Shawna walked me to my first class, and then left to go to her own. The teacher handed me a textbook and pointed me to a desk, and I sat down. The next 45 minutes passed in a haze of the teacher’s voice, my classmates’ voices, words on the chalkboard, books opening and closing, and a voice breaking in periodically over the speaker hanging on the wall. Eventually, the bell rang, and everyone stood up. I stood up, too, and walked with everyone else to the door. The teacher stopped me, said something, smiled, and then turned away. I had no clue what she had said. Shawna was waiting at the door, ready to take me to my next class.
The rest of the day was a series of different classes, different teachers and students, but the same exact events. Teachers talked and wrote on the board. Students talked to each other, and sometimes to the teachers. Teachers handed me books and sometimes said things to me. The kids didn’t. At one point, instead of walking me to a classroom, Shawna escorted me to a cafeteria, and we stood in line, as food was loaded on plates and handed to us by the ladies behind the counters. I carried all of my new textbooks on my tray, along with my lunch, though I noticed that Shawna didn’t have any books. When we got to the cash register, I panicked. Other kids handed over money to pay for their lunch. I had no money. But the cashier just waved me on, apparently expecting no payment from me. Shawna and I ate lunch at a table filled mostly with boys, who all worked very hard to get her attention. After lunch, it was more classes, more teachers and students, more announcements by the disembodied voice from the wall-mounted speakers.
By the last class, I was thoroughly overwhelmed, confused, and bit depressed, but now I was also desperate. I needed a bathroom! The last class was P.E., and Shawna had dropped me off at the gym and left. I knew that if I didn’t find the bathroom, things would go from bad to catastrophic, so I ducked back out into the hall and began to wander, hoping to find the bathroom. After a few minutes, I spotted a door that clearly didn’t lead into a classroom. The handle didn’t move, there were no numbers on the wall or the door, and there was a stick-figure picture of a male figure (no skirt, that’s how I could tell), and a sign over the picture that I couldn’t read, but which, I was sure meant that this was a bathroom, but not for me. Kids were racing by me, hurrying to their last classes, and I grabbed someone and pointed at the door, then at myself. The person I had snagged shrugged and kept going. I repeated this procedure several times, until finally, a girl took pity on me and showed me the door to the girls bathroom. I ran in, peed in a hurry (not that there was any other way), and found my way back to the gym, where a man dressed in shorts and a too-tight polo shirt was yelling something to a group of students sitting on the bleachers. I slid onto one of the benches and stayed there quietly until the bell rang and the man stopped yelling.
Shawna wasn’t at the door, which was fine, since there were no more classes. I breathed a sigh of relief and began looking for my locker. One had been assigned to me, and I had a slip of paper in my pocket with the locker number and the combination with some basic directions for unlocking it shown with arrows. I eventually found the locker and opened it after a few tries. I put away all the books I had been carrying with me, closed my locker, and turned to go outside to get on the bus that would carry me home. The halls were empty, and I wasn’t sure how to get back to the front door, so it took a few more minutes for me to find it. I opened the door in time to see the rain coming down in sheets and the last bus driving away.
That was when I finally lost my composure and cried like a baby. I stood outside, feeling the most sorry for myself that I had ever felt, and getting completely soaked to boot. After a little while, an adult came and found me, and I was taken back to Mrs. Gail’s office. She called my parents, and then I followed her out to the faculty lot and got into her car, and she drove me home. Once I was back in our apartment, I ran to my room and began stripping off my wet clothes. I was never wearing those stupid white pants and green shirt again, no matter what my mother said. When the stupid white pants came off, I saw the red stain. Apparently, my young uterus was in complete agreement about the pants, since no amount of laundering was going to get that stain out. I did my best not to think about when the stain might have happened, grateful at least for the fact that I probably had gotten through all my classes before it did, since it wasn’t there when I had used the bathroom just before P.E.
The next day, dressed in bell-bottom jeans and a basic t-shirt in spite of my mother’s objections, I boarded the school bus and went back to Meyer Middle School, home of the Mustangs. Shawna met me at the door, and we walked to my classes together, and then to lunch and the bathroom, thank God! The teachers talked and wrote on the board, and I sat quietly and listened. I didn’t understand what people were saying, but it became obvious that nobody expected me to, and I wasn’t expected to do any work yet, either. This was my year to listen and watch. So I did.
Between classes, I saw that kids dropped off some books at their lockers and picked up other books, and so I did the same. I listened as Shawna talked to her friends and flirted with boys. During our English tutoring sessions, Shawna told me the names of all the cute boys and what clothes were the most in style, and she taught me how to put on eyeliner, mascara, and lip gloss, which I had to wash off before going home. I listened to conversations on the bus and in the cafeteria. Within a couple of months, I knew enough to begin stringing together sentences. As soon as other kids saw me trying to speak English, many of them jumped in to help, teaching me more new words and expressions. Soon I could swear like a sailor and had a few choice slang expressions under my belt. By the end of the school year, I was speaking fluent English with no discernible accent, unless you count the Kentucky southern drawl.
I’m very lucky. I’m good with languages. I had caring, patient teachers and classmates who were nice to me. To be fair, if any of my classmates had said anything unkind to me in those first few months, I wouldn’t have understood them, but still. That first year was a sink-or-swim situation. There were no ELL classes, and nobody at Meyers Middle School spoke Russian. You either learned and assimilated, or you didn’t. I did. At home, my parents insisted that my brother and I speak English and correct their English, so they could learn from us, a practice that is rare in immigrant homes. And there was American TV with its endless commercials, and there was the radio and all those songs.
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