The Good Old Days

[Sumeri]

I am 45 years old. I went to public schools in the 70's and eighties.

Nowhere during that time do I remember saying a prayer in school, discussing God in school, or engaging in any Christian themed exercise in school.

Sure, at Christmas we sang Christmas songs, but they were always the secular variety - "White Christmas" Or "Happy Holidays" or "Jingle Bells" or "Santa Claus is coming to Town". Those were interspersed with "Dreidel", "Deyenu" and I remember a few times we danced the Hora at events (one of my favorite memories ever is dancing the Hora with Mayor Harold Washington at a Catholic University). We certainly weren't singing CAROLS, or discussing Jesus in school, ever. He really never came up, as we were busy doing other things, like learning science.

If there was a death, we had a moment of silence, not a prayer. I remember a moment of silence for John Lennon, Mayor Daley and Pope John Paul. I remember celebrating the Iran hostages' release -- but nary a prayer was said about any of those events.

So where are the fundies getting this idea that it's just recently that we're not "welcoming God" in school? Do any of you of a similar age or older who didn't go to parochial school remember a time when folks were sitting in the classroom discussing creationism and praying out loud?

[NjoyingNsanity]

Well you're ten years older than me but I started school in 80/81 and graduated in 95 and while I grew up in a small southern town there was still little to no real mention of the Bible in school. The only exception I do remember an elementary school teacher teaching us the "God is great, God is good let us thank him for our food." prayer in a public school at lunchtime. That was one elderly teacher very early on by middle school there was zero mentions of God. In high school our only mentions of religion were in history classes where we learned about other world religions such as Islam or Buddhism, or when discusses the reformation and how it effected European history and had a hand in the beginnings of the United States. Funny thing we grew up with video games and violence on tv and none of us ever went on a shooting spree. We had several deaths but they were all due to accidents or illnesses we always had a moment of silence and planted a tree in remembrance. We had one student who shot a police officer, but he had been troubled for years because he had just been a toddler when he witnessed his mother commit suicide. All in all most of us grew up to be normal well-adjusted adults despite our secular education.

[pixydust]

My mother was born in 53, and she had daily prayer in school. I think that they stopped it in the early 60's (like 62), when Madalyn Murray O'Hare sued Maryland over it.

[ADoyle90815]

I'm also one who went to "evil" public schools, and one thing I do remember was that after the Challenger disaster, there was a moment of silence. I also remember that there was a Bible as Literature class offered in high school, but it wasn't designed as a religious class, as it focused on the Bible as a bunch of stories. Sometimes in world history class, there would be a mention of religions, but only in the context of history, such as the Crusades for example.

[debrand]

I graduated in 1985. We had some sex education and learned about evolution. Even though I was in the south and teachers were upfront about being religious outside of class, they didn't lead anyone in prayer. In fact, they seemed to support the lack of prayer in school and explained it as freedom of religion and separation of church and state. We had a pretty good understanding of freedom of speech and why it was important to protect.

I remember some older people muttering about the lack of prayer in school but I don't remember that much complaining.

[thetabmeister]

Referring to any period of time as "the good old days" is really just a person's (or specifically, a fundy's) way of misinterpreting the past to fit their opinions of what it should have been, and/or in order to use it as an excuse to fashion the current times around their opinions of what should be. People of opposing viewpoints have existed since the beginning of civilization, and the especially fundy obsession with a rose-colored past that is completely unhistorical is quite irritating to me. I get into it on Facebook with my relatives all the time. :roll:

[Biscuit]

I'm 45 also, and went to public schools in the Chicago area, but in a very white, homongenous suburb. We did sing Christian Christmas songs. I don't remember ever praying in school or formal discussions about religion but we did talk about it amongst ourselves. Most kids were Catholic and I felt very left out because I had no religious upbringing. In my high school history class, we did a worksheet for fun the day before Christmas break, and I remember not knowing any of the answers because they were about the religious aspects of the holiday.

I also remember that the days off from school were named differently...My kids get off school the Friday before Easter because it is called the Spring Holiday. When I went to school, that day off was officially called Good Friday. What is now termed Winter Break and Spring Break were Christmas Break and Easter Vacation.

When my kids were in elementary school (2000-2012), they did a holiday song performance every year. Now, I'm not fundy and I don't generally walk around feeling persecuted ;) but I have to say, the school went out of their way to eliminate any religious Christmas songs, but did include songs about Kwanzaa, Ramadan, and Hannukah. I certainly welcomed the inclusion of these songs but I missed hearing some of my old favorites from childhood, like "Away in a Manger". Anyway, I think things have changed a bit since the 70s and 80s, but prayer in public schools had already ended by then.

[2xx1xy1JD]

I'm Canadian, so our laws were a bit different with no formal separation of church and state.

I did indeed go to a school where the Lord's Prayer was said daily from grade 1 to grade 8, right after the national anthem. There was the occasional bible reading, although my parents did complain when one teacher also seemed to pick readings from the New Testament. I was in the glee club, and did sing real Christmas carols.

My parents attended schools run by the Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal. Not only did they get all of the above, but they had hymns like "Jesus loves me" and study of the New Testament.

Before any fundie starts to get nostalgic, though, I should add:

- my school was 80% Jewish, while my parents' was 99% Jewish

- the kids in the school yard told me that the Lord's Prayer is from the NT, and I should say a Jewish prayer instead. Usually, though, I used that minute to finish my last math problem. My parents said that lots of kids just hummed instead of singing Jesus' name.

- we had sex ed

- I didn't just attend an ebil public high school - I attended a public high school that was started as an alternative educational experiment in the late 1960s, where there were no rules and the hippie teachers actively undermined authority and even promoted drug use to the students.

- School prayer and carols didn't turn any of us into Christians. Some aren't particularly religious at all, others now send their kids to private Jewish schools where Christmas doesn't exist

- I will admit to a small soft spot for Christmas carols (not bad Xmas pop songs), simply because I liked singing harmonies in glee club. I'm now the only one in our family and among some of our neighbors who knows them.

[Dysfundamental]

48. School years spent in a small all-white, all-Christian rural New England town. We sang Christmas carols and Hanukkah songs (or "Chah-new-key-ah" as one of the teachers pronounced it), and we watched an educational film about Kwanzaa featuring some guys with truly amazing sideburns. No prayers, but Pledge of Allegiance every day (except for the Jehovah's Witness and Baha'i kids) and a "moment of silence".

[jaynie]

Referring to any period of time as "the good old days" is really just a person's (or specifically, a fundy's) way of misinterpreting the past to fit their opinions of what it should have been, and/or in order to use it as an excuse to fashion the current times around their opinions of what should be. People of opposing viewpoints have existed since the beginning of civilization, and the especially fundy obsession with a rose-colored past that is completely unhistorical is quite irritating to me. I get into it on Facebook with my relatives all the time. :roll:

I think there is quite a lot of "the good old days" = "the image I had of life when I was a child". How many boomers do you know who think the 50s/60s were a peachy, golden two decades filled with women in beautiful dresses, handsome suited fathers, polite children, and absolutely nothing to worry about at all. Never mind that there was a cold war -- and several not so cold wars -- going on, and half those housewives were self-medicating their depression with alcohol, and some of those fathers could be taken to prison for knowing someone who knows a communist, etc. You don't hear about that stuff when you're a kid, so it mustn't have happened, right? I'm only 23 and I'm already hearing people talk about how much safer we were in the 90s, although I'm sure in many people's eyes we were already well into the Great Cultural Decline. It's kind of like how a friend of mine said you never used to hear about bus beheadings or on-purpose home explosions or things like that -- as if her parents would have let her watch those things on the news as a wee child. And she's a smart woman -- it just didn't occur to her. If you add in a bias towards thinking society is collapsing (which fundiedom certainly has) and a longing for certain abandoned norms (husband in charge, etc), the nostalgia goggles become pretty powerful.

[keen23]

34- large New England coastal suburb, 96% white, largely Catholic population. Went to public school. Pledge of Allegiance every day was about the only mention of God in the school day. We sang secular Christmas songs like Frosty, Jingle Bells, and We Wish You A Merry Christmas. We had Christmas parties before Christmas vacation started. Everyone made Christmas crafts like wreaths made of green cut out hands and Christmas trees made out of triangles. My elementary school each year had a "Jingle Market" where kids could buy Christmas presents for their families or whoever. I turned out to be a Krismas celebrating Atheist, married to a lapsed Catholic. The only thing I remember was there was one family, and the girl would leave the classroom whenever someone's Mom would bring in birthday cake. She also didn't go do music class with the rest of us, and would go to the library while we were in music (I was jealous, I hated singing and would have preferred to sit in the library reading by myself). Maybe they were Jehovah's Witnesses? I'm not sure. She was in my school until 4th grade, and then they moved away.

[kolga]

46, grew up in the deep South. We had a "moment of silence" every day in high school in which we were supposed to pray, but they couldn't say that. I read during that minute, and got in trouble for it a lot.

We had "Religious Emphasis Week" every year during the week before Easter, in which pastors from the local churches would come and give speeches about the glory of Jesus Christ. The various student groups (Honor Society, cheerleaders, etc.) would put on skits about how wonderful it was to be a Christian. Attendance at these was mandatory.

We had prayers before every football game, and at every graduation.

[Conuly]

I'm only 23 and I'm already hearing people talk about how much safer we were in the 90s, although I'm sure in many people's eyes we were already well into the Great Cultural Decline.

And of course, in reality the 90s were the tail end of a 30 year old crime high.

The nieces don't know a thing about this tragedy. They have a vague idea some people died on the other end of the island during the storm, but no specifics. They don't believe we've been at war their whole lives. And when they're grown, and they know everything, I'm sure they'll think it was safer when they were young.

[JenniferJuniper]

Graduated from public HS in MA in 1980. During elementary school days, which would have been 1968 to 1974, there was no prayer in school whatsoever. (I can't even remember the Pledge of Allegiance until high school. Which was then followed up by school announcements and then Springsteen's Born To Run on the intercom. Every day we would walk from home room to our first classes with Born To Run playing. I don't know why. Bruce just started out every day for us.)

Most in the district were Catholic with the second largest group being Jewish and we never sang any religious songs in December. I remember the Santa-based tunes (I'm seeing the Santa vs. Jesus South Park sing-off in my mind right now) and things like The Marvelous Toy and, of course, the obligatory Dreidel Song.

We always had Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur off as holidays, although the religious significance was never addressed any more than was the significance of Good Friday. We figured if it meant something to a family, cool, if not, free days off for the rest of us.

So I guess in my neck of the woods the Good Old Days must have happened before 1968. Although, if they did happen, I'm sure they annoyed the heck out of the fairly large Jewish population.

As an aside, I was waiting in a doctor's office earlier today when the receptionist checking out a patient said to the woman, "Have a Merry Christmas". I can't say for sure what the ethnicity of the patient was, although she could have been of Middle Eastern descent. She turned and very pointedly said to the receptionist "And I hope you have very happy holidays". I laughed as she walked past me and she winked.

Why do some Christians feel the need to insist that everyone celebrate their holidays?

[Fargood]

46, grew up in the deep South. We had a "moment of silence" every day in high school in which we were supposed to pray, but they couldn't say that. I read during that minute, and got in trouble for it a lot.

We had "Religious Emphasis Week" every year during the week before Easter, in which pastors from the local churches would come and give speeches about the glory of Jesus Christ. The various student groups (Honor Society, cheerleaders, etc.) would put on skits about how wonderful it was to be a Christian. Attendance at these was mandatory.

We had prayers before every football game, and at every graduation.

This was interesting to read. I grew up in the northern US and my experience seems so much different than those in the south. The heritage around here is mainly Scandinavian. The Norges don't really like co-mingling religion and education. If you wanted to go to church or confirmation or whatever, you did that on Wednesday evenings down at the church. The biggest cooperation I remember was in the middle 80's when the school finally asked teachers not to assign large homework assignments on Wednesday, because that was widely known as "church night".

I have several Mormon cousins from Utah and their experience is much different, too. They even had seminary at their school.

[2xx1xy1JD]

I think there is quite a lot of "the good old days" = "the image I had of life when I was a child". How many boomers do you know who think the 50s/60s were a peachy, golden two decades filled with women in beautiful dresses, handsome suited fathers, polite children, and absolutely nothing to worry about at all. Never mind that there was a cold war -- and several not so cold wars -- going on, and half those housewives were self-medicating their depression with alcohol, and some of those fathers could be taken to prison for knowing someone who knows a communist, etc. You don't hear about that stuff when you're a kid, so it mustn't have happened, right? I'm only 23 and I'm already hearing people talk about how much safer we were in the 90s, although I'm sure in many people's eyes we were already well into the Great Cultural Decline. It's kind of like how a friend of mine said you never used to hear about bus beheadings or on-purpose home explosions or things like that -- as if her parents would have let her watch those things on the news as a wee child. And she's a smart woman -- it just didn't occur to her. If you add in a bias towards thinking society is collapsing (which fundiedom certainly has) and a longing for certain abandoned norms (husband in charge, etc), the nostalgia goggles become pretty powerful.

Absolutely.

I laugh when people half my age talk about "the good ole days", because I remember crime rates being higher, especially in large cities like New York.

There are really only two ways to remember childhood: very good, or very bad. You were either too young to really know about and appreciate bad stuff that was going on, or it was so bad that it impacted you directly and left you traumatized because you were too young to cope with it.

I remember hearing this false nostalgia theory on The Daily Show, and I went back over my childhood photos while asking myself, "what else was happening in the world?" Guess what I found:

- those great pictures of me surrounded by extended family and presents and cake in our quiet home on my 2nd birthday? One day I did the math and realized that they coincided with the Yom Kippur War, so my hubby would have been screaming in a bomb shelter around the same time.

- that great picture of me and my friend at age 4, dressed in purple and enjoying a spring day on the lawn of our quiet, peaceful suburban home? I was too young to know that it coincided with the fall of Saigon during the Vietnam War. In fact, I was also too young to realize that the Vietnam War was going on at all.

So yes, in my mind the 1970s were all sunshine and roses and cool music, with nothing more traumatic that crazy clothes.

I'm sure my kids will be the same way. I didn't realize until we visited New York that my youngest two had no idea was 9/11 was - it was such a large presence in our lives that I simply assumed the kids would have known about it, but they were busy watching cartoons. They were also oblivious to the fact that there were wars in Afghanistan and Iraq during their earliest years.

[sparkles]

I'm 58 and I have very vivid memories of prayer in school, at every assembly and to start every school day. The Lord's Prayer, a prayer clearly not meant to include the many Jewish kids in my school. Nobody was terribly put out when school sanctioned prayer was abolished (or when the Christmas concert was changed to the holiday concert, as our school became more and more ethnically and religiously diverse.) Throughout junior and senior high however, we always had a moment of silence after the pledge--it was your time to do whatever you wished--and no one had a problem with it. Kids who wanted to pray prayed. Kids who wanted to meditate meditated. And so on. I still don't see why it would be an issue, as long as there's no religious pressure brought to bear.

I honestly don't remember much divisiveness over religion. Other than the fact that the Catholic kids left early for CCD on Wednesdays, it was hardly mentioned. See, all you fundie jackholes, people CAN get along without everyone having to swear allegiance to the same god.

[Sumeri]

I honestly don't remember much divisiveness over religion. Other than the fact that the Catholic kids left early for CCD on Wednesdays, it was hardly mentioned. See, all you fundie jackholes, people CAN get along without everyone having to swear allegiance to the same god.

That's how I remember it. My elementary school was very diverse, so kids were always leaving early for something, be it CCD or Hebrew school or Greek (Orthodox) school or whatever. I remember going to Purim carnivals with my friends and them coming to our Christmas do's at church. It really wasn't a big deal. Our first boy/girl dances were at the JCC, summer camp was sponsored by the YMCA, the Greek and Catholic churches had the best and more boozy carnivals ;) .

[Jinger Jar]

I'm 52 and attended a small Catholic school K-12. We went to daily Mass, said prayers before each class and at the end of the day, and had religion class, obviously. But we also sang secular songs at the Christmas pageant, made Santa Claus and Rudolph out of tissue paper, and made Easter bunnies out of cotton balls and glue. In high school we were allowed to trade secret admirer roses on Valentine's Day, and we celebrated Sweetest Day. The sisters let us ditch our uniforms at Halloween and wear costumes. I know a lot of Catholic parents today who would pull their kids out of parochial school in a heartbeat if the school did some of these things.

On the other hand, we had the bejesus scared out of us with regular nuclear bomb drills. We watched coffins be unloaded from military planes and on TV every night. Watergate left us with a feeling of zero political efficacy because we had proof that politicians were just a bunch of lying crooks.

I grew up near Kent State, and between that and Vietnam my classmates and I were very suspicious of the military. One of my classmates was accepted at West Point, and I'm ashamed to admit this now, but we ostracized him when we found out. We felt as if he'd betrayed us. It's hard to imagine for someone under 30 just how much people my age and older distrusted the military.

The national economy was in toilet, a big employer in our town pulled out, and a lot of us had unemployed parents. By the time I was a teenager there were no jobs in my community for kids my age. A lot of our parents were flipping burgers and stocking shelves for minimum wage. As I readied for college I remember high school teachers wondering aloud if any of us would be able to find jobs, even with a bachelor's degree.

Our cars broke down all the time. Or caught fire and exploded. Lead in paint, plumbing, and the glaze on dishes made people sick. Major appliances would break the minute you got them home from the store, and there wasn't much you could do about it. Consumer protection was all but nonexistent.

Domestic violence was automatically blamed on the victim by relatives, the police, and the courts and no one questioned it but those loony women's libbers. The newspaper would interview the man on the street about how often and under what circumstances they would hit their wives. This was supposed to be humorous. Alcoholism also was a source of humor. People would ply a drunk with liquor to make him the life of the party. "Experts" told us that being tipsy actually made you a better driver, and people would look at you as if you were nuts if you suggested taking someone's keys away from them before they got behind the wheel. Child development "experts" argued that it was impossible for parents to actually abuse their children. Other "experts" argued that the safest place for a baby in a car was in its mother's arms and actively dissuaded parents from using car seats. Doctors got on the Phil Donahue show and advised women that they risked infertility if they exercised because it jiggled our ovaries around.

Everybody smoked everywhere - doctor's offices, the bank, on public transportation, sporting events, hospital rooms, in the YMCA, and at ballet class. I am not making this up - my high school had a smoking room next door to the library that was reserved for the priests who smoked and for juniors and seniors. We weren't allowed to smoke anywhere else on campus, but we were allowed to carry lighters and packs of cigarettes on us and smoke after lunch. It wasn't, however, nearly as sexy as Mad Men portrays it. Everybody and every thing reeked of cigarette smoke. I inherited table linens my grandmother crocheted in the 60s. I bring them out every year at Christmas, and if you stick your nose close and inhale deeply, you can smell the cigarette smoke.

The 70s were a gloomy, dismal, pessimistic time, and I don't really give a flying Frisbee what fundies think it was like. I lived it, and wouldn't ever, ever be persuaded to go back to those days.

[Lynley]

I was in public elementary school in the early 90s, in rural Canada. We sang 'God Save the Queen' and recited the Lord's prayer in the morning. I don't think it's done any more, though. In the region I grew up in, when my mother was a child, there were no 'secular' schools - there was 'protestant' and 'catholic'. Since then, the protestant schools have become 'public secular,' though most of them still had prayer when I was there, but no religious courses. The Catholic have remained Catholic (still publicly funded).

[jenny_islander]

41 and kids said grace in school all the time on their own initiative with nobody saying boo about it. We did the Pledge of Allegiance every morning with the Cold War "under God" clause. In the lower grades we sang Christian and Jewish religious songs during the Holidays, but a Jehovah's Witness challenged this and we had to go secular. In the upper grades we studied American religious history extensively because it is inextricable from the rest of American culture. I had a double-barreled American history & lit class in high school that introduced me to deism, Calvinism, etc. Religion was treated with the same respect as any other topic, but no religious or anti-religious agenda was pushed by any teacher, ever. In fact I couldn't have told you what church any of them attended or whether they were religious at all. Oh, wait, I think I asked my British Lit teacher point blank for some reason and he said he was agnostic.

[Loveday]

54, and I remember saying grace before snacktime in kindergarten. That was in 1963. I don't know when we stopped, but I'm sure it was either sometime during that year, or it was dropped between that year and the next. I don't remember any issues with religion in school at all over the next 12 years, except as others have mentioned, in conjunction with history classes. The topic just never seemed to come up, unlike now. :?

The 70s were a gloomy, dismal, pessimistic time, and I don't really give a flying Frisbee what fundies think it was like. I lived it, and wouldn't never, ever be persuaded to go back to those days.

Yeah, I kind of feel the same way about the 70s, for the most part. :?

[moodygirl86]

I'm only 26 but I think what some "good old days" types forget is that there has always been crime/violence/out of control kids and so on. It's just that you hear about it more these days because of 24 hour news via the TV and internet. Like somebody upthread said, domestic violence and its like were swept under the carpet. Racism/homophobia was accepted.

It does make me laugh though when right wingers/some people over a certain age start on one of these rants about how children were politer and better behaved in their day. Next time it happens, I'm going to say, "Yeah, you're right! I mean, children of your generation may not have had as many rights/privileges/education as mine did, but at least they said please when they asked to throw stones at an ethnic minority!"

[Austin]

I'm 52 and attended a small Catholic school K-12. We went to daily Mass, said prayers before each class and at the end of the day, and had religion class, obviously. But we also sang secular songs at the Christmas pageant, made Santa Claus and Rudolph out of tissue paper, and made Easter bunnies out of cotton balls and glue. In high school we were allowed to trade secret admirer roses on Valentine's Day, and we celebrated Sweetest Day. The sisters let us ditch our uniforms at Halloween and wear costumes. I know a lot of Catholic parents today who would pull their kids out of parochial school in a heartbeat if the school did some of these things.

On the other hand, we had the bejesus scared out of us with regular nuclear bomb drills. We watched coffins be unloaded from military planes and on TV every night. Watergate left us with a feeling of zero political efficacy because we had proof that politicians were just a bunch of lying crooks.

I grew up near Kent State, and between that and Vietnam my classmates and I were very suspicious of the military. One of my classmates was accepted at West Point, and I'm ashamed to admit this now, but we ostracized him when we found out. We felt as if he'd betrayed us. It's hard to imagine for someone under 30 just how much people my age and older distrusted the military.

The national economy was in toilet, a big employer in our town pulled out, and a lot of us had unemployed parents. By the time I was a teenager there were no jobs in my community for kids my age. A lot of our parents were flipping burgers and stocking shelves for minimum wage. As I readied for college I remember high school teachers wondering aloud if any of us would be able to find jobs, even with a bachelor's degree.

Our cars broke down all the time. Or caught fire and exploded. Lead in paint, plumbing, and the glaze on dishes made people sick. Major appliances would break the minute you got them home from the store, and there wasn't much you could do about it. Consumer protection was all but nonexistent.

Domestic violence was automatically blamed on the victim by relatives, the police, and the courts and no one questioned it but those loony women's libbers. The newspaper would interview the man on the street about how often and under what circumstances they would hit their wives. This was supposed to be humorous. Alcoholism also was a source of humor. People would ply a drunk with liquor to make him the life of the party. "Experts" told us that being tipsy actually made you a better driver, and people would look at you as if you were nuts if you suggested taking someone's keys away from them before they got behind the wheel. Child development "experts" argued that it was impossible for parents to actually abuse their children. Other "experts" argued that the safest place for a baby in a car was in its mother's arms and actively dissuaded parents from using car seats. Doctors got on the Phil Donahue show and advised women that they risked infertility if they exercised because it jiggled our ovaries around.

Everybody smoked everywhere - doctor's offices, the bank, on public transportation, sporting events, hospital rooms, in the YMCA, and at ballet class. I am not making this up - my high school had a smoking room next door to the library that was reserved for the priests who smoked and for juniors and seniors. We weren't allowed to smoke anywhere else on campus, but we were allowed to carry lighters and packs of cigarettes on us and smoke after lunch. It wasn't, however, nearly as sexy as Mad Men portrays it. Everybody and every thing reeked of cigarette smoke. I inherited table linens my grandmother crocheted in the 60s. I bring them out every year at Christmas, and if you stick your nose close and inhale deeply, you can smell the cigarette smoke.

The 70s were a gloomy, dismal, pessimistic time, and I don't really give a flying Frisbee what fundies think it was like. I lived it, and wouldn't ever, ever be persuaded to go back to those days.

My kids have a hard time believing that my high school (graduated in '82) had a smoking section. For students. Trufax.

[Dysfundamental]

Jinger Jar, what you said rings so true for me.

Most of what I remember of high school and junior high was being cold. So cold. The energy crisis was in full swing and the school had turned the heat way down, to the point where you could see your breath in the north-facing classrooms. And you weren't allowed to wear your coat, hat, or gloves in class because they were considered "discipline issues".

We also had to bring paper from home for typing class because the school system was so broke.