Above: First Driver License, 1976,December 18, Age 16 and 1/2 years.

 

Above: Speech Club. Provenance: The provenance of the speech club picture (above) is a little murky. It appears in the 1977 school catalog, but it is the earlier of two speech club pictures. I place it on my 1976 page because I look young here, and I believe that it was therefore either from the first half of the 76-77 school year (1976), or else from some time in the 75-76 school year (my eleventh grade year.) In the photo are Larry Hunter, Alexis Harmon, Marc Goldberg, Sung Choe, Judy Carlisle, Janet Wong, Mrs. Kay Ross, Thair Peterson, Eric Symons, Robert Rosdorff, Eroica Mankewiecz, Miles Hochstein, Josh Mallin.

Another important fact about the 1976-1977 academic year, my 12th grade year, when I was 17 years old, is that I was a "high school dropout" of sorts. I simply couldn't fit in or feel comfortable in the mainstream classes at Hollywood High School. For reasons more emotional than intellectual, I had not done well (or simply not had fun? I can't remember) in 11th grade, and had become increasingly unhappy, and so I entered the relatively nonstructured "Hollywood Alternative School" in five portable classrooms on the Hollywood High School campus. We still had classes but we could complete work on our own schedule.

Speech club was my main high school extra curricular activity, and I won some prizes in speaking, but I don't believe I ever won prizes or a major tournament in debate, which was my real love.

I enjoyed the verbal combat of debate immensely. My debate partner Marc Goldberg/Weinstein and I also delighted in making absurd arguments for which our opponents were often unprepared. We advanced the absurd proposition that courts of law could be replaced by polygraphic "lie detector tests."

I saw debate as a great game, in which truth and the final conclusion were only tangentially relevant, but the joy of argument was everything.

Perhaps it was the same love of argument that propelled me into the study of Talmud in later years. And this is still a fundamental personality characteristic. I love a spirited argument, and I'm as happy defending one side of a proposition as another. I have been accused of arguing with people just for the pleasure of it, and it would be foolish to deny the reckless pleasure I take in what I prefer to think of as "spirited discussion of issues." The joy is in the combat, in the play of words and ideas. The "truth" that emerges is that there are multiple truths, all defensible, all possible.

~

Below: Scott P. visited Hollywood High in 2004 and sent me this contemporary picture of the very bungalos in which the Alternative School was located on the HHS campus.

I only thought of this recently as my interest in unschooling and freeschools and alternative schools for my own children has grown. I realized that my involvement in "alternative schools" goes way back. This, 1976, was the moment in time when my limitless faith in learning, schooling and in my own intelligence first met up against the reality that I was not happy studying to pass tests.

Above: Hollywood High School Alternative School Scene, circa 1976. That's Alexis H. near the center on the couch.

Left and above: Photos by me, taken with tripod and self timer at our Hollywood Hills home on Ledgewood Drive. Could be anywhere in the 3 year 1974 to 1976 period. Difficult to be certain.

 

1976

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revised October 2004