Senior Year, Period 1: U.S. Government/Current Events

My senior year required us all to take the U.S. Government class for one semester and another Social Studies class for the second semester to fulfill our requirements for graduation. The Current Events class was the only one available in the same time slot for the spring semester, so I took that. Virtually the entire class did the exact same thing. We were supposed to have the same teacher both semesters, but the Government teacher quit at the end of the fall semester to go work for the oil industry in Artesia.

I don't recall much about the Government class. There wasn't a lot that we hadn't already learned in previous Social Studies classes. A year before (1980), they had the Presidential election to work into the class and everybody got really into it. We didn't get to do anything special. The teacher was one of the more popular ones on campus. When I did the college-style registration, this was the first class I signed up for. It turned out to be the first class that got completely filled up.

We wound up with a fresh new teacher for the second semester. He had been a student teacher the previous semester and did some coaching on the football team. Everyone called him "Chief," even after he became a full-time teacher. He probably wasn't much older than 22. He was really able to relate to the students because of his age, but that didn't necessarily make him a good teacher.

One interesting thing was that when we did role-playing one day, he was able to pick up on my image as the class loser, and this was by making very little contact with me.

The class itself was mostly about a lot of issues that were a part of what was going on in the outside world at that time. He even spent some time on the prospects of job interviewing. He told us about what he experienced when he interviewed in college to be a Resident Assistant and had me be the one trying for the job. He was asking all these crazy questions, which was what he actually went through. I thought the wacky interview was something I would only encounter in college. It would turn out to be something I dealt with later in my post-college life. I will go into detail about that when the time comes.

I never saw the Government teacher again, even though he still lived in Artesia. The next year, I saw Chief at a restaurant in the town where I went to college. He had gotten a job at a school in another town in New Mexico and was with one of the sports teams. He did not remember me.

I guess the main problem I had with both classes was that, at no point did we discuss the fundamental differences between Republicans and Democrats. In one way, I guess that was good because I went through the early part of my life with no preconceived notions about what the memberships of the two parties consisted of. However, in my early stages of adulthood, I had a hard time grasping the real issues in government and couldn't understand why the two groups always seemed to be diametrically opposed to each other.

This issue would come back to haunt me later in life.