unsurprisingly, the united states' national fetish for useless, puritanical sexual education curriculum has failed to penetrate the berkeley public school system. i remember comprehensive, practical, age-appropriate sex ed in sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, and i think they're doing it even earlier now. i also remember "sex ed" in tenth grade. that one was considerably less useful - not because abstinence fanaticism had snuck its way into the high school, but because it turns out that sex ed doesn't exist solely on a spectrum between "usefully comprehensive" and "uselessly moralizing." there's a third option: just tell the kids a bunch of dumb nonsense. they're kids, how are they going to know?

berkeley high had a daily "bulletin" that contained campus announcements. the specific delivery mechanism changed every year i was there, but even at its most ignored i think there was a printed copy in every classroom each day. anyone could put something in the bulletin as long as they had a teacher's approval, but i suspected that the vetting of both the approvals and the announcements themselves was entirely perfunctory, and i floated this hypothesis to some peers. one of them, a big stickler for rules, found this ridiculous - of course they wouldn't let you put any dumb bullshit in the bulletin, especially if you had to forge a teacher's signature to do it.

folks, you already know which of us was right, because i wouldn't be writing this story if it weren't me.

i spent most of my berkeley high career in proximity to its upper echelon of teachers, thanks to a combination of my affinity for schooling and my bizarrely good fortune. my record wasn't perfect, though - my freshman year history teacher was a real piece of work, one of those incompetent creeps who manage to dig themselves into faculties and remain there despite rank incompetence and misbehavior, presumably due to some combination of luck and blackmail. apparently he was hired to "resuscitate" the berkeley high football program, but in the time i was there nobody really gave a shit about the football program - even my buddy who played on the team - so i'm guessing he suckered a bunch of people to get the gig. reporting about his career before and after berkeley high paints the man as a piece of garbage, and that sure squares with my experience of him at berkeley high.

berkeley high has an open campus, meaning that students can come and go as they please. in theory, outsiders aren't supposed to be able to, but during my tenure there the campus wasn't physically laid out to accommodate access control, so the administration had no real way to keep random people out. the adults, concerned about student safety, experimented with various ways to partially close the campus. none of them worked, because they all required the consent of the governed, and we never gave it.

the year before i entered berkeley high, some students burned down a building. not on purpose or anything - someone just started a trash can fire that got out of control. i guess the building wasn't really needed, so the administration replaced its remains with a grass circle that has some benches and stuff. it was a surprisingly nice space (for berkeley high anyway) and we students collectively decided that it needed a proper name, so we started calling it the Bradley Johnson Memorial Green. our classmate bradley johnson wasn't too happy about that.