playing well and getting along with others

When we were in grade school of course we were little shavers (comes from chip off the old block), and we didn't know a whole lot, and everybody was way bigger than us, and that school building, huge, and it was run by the city which was run by the state which was run by the country and the country was run by the UN of course.  Well not really of course, but from a kid's view it looked like the topmost block on the tower. 

The UN got a pretty good press in those days, at least at Enrico Tonti School, and also in My Weekly Reader which was the news of the world.  Seems like they had all these charitable organizations, and they had that magnificent new blue block of a building (in retrospect just another international style nonentity), and it seemed like the wave of the modernist future.  Actually I think at that point the US was sort of running the UN, the Korean war was technically some kind of UN police action.

But anyway we were not even cogs in this huge machine, we were just the marbles that ran through it, entering as soft mewling babes and leaving as upright little citizens who could read and write and recite the pledge of allegiance blindfolded and with one arm tied behind our backs.

And then there were those report cards, which for some reason Chicago used S, E, G, F, and P, while the rest of the world used the more logical A, B, C, D, and E. And on the back of the the page were the checks.  Even if you were a smart little shaver, it could mean naught if you did not play well and get along with others.  If Teach, who inexplicably seemed to have it in for you because of some unfortunate misunderstanding about the proper use of paste, took the time to put a bright blue check (why did she have to press the pen so hard?) in that square, it's hard to belief it was some trifling matter.

That dreaded school office was a virtual fortress, with an army of secretaries pushing pens all day long, who could not imagine those checkmarks transcribed into those files locked into those hard steel cabinets (hack those Jack), and certainly (possibly by armored truck) following you into high school, and thence to college or the army or to wherever you found employment with that shining high school diploma?

I don't think we thought much about privacy in those days.  This was the fifties, and even the early sixties were still the fifties and there were only three networks and there was only one way to be and that was the right way like everybody else, and if you weren't a right fellow, if you had a permanent record of not playing well and getting along with others, certainly you had no right to hide that from your fellow upright citizens.