i've seen one and a half lacrosse games in my life. one of them was a women's lacrosse game i watched while touring the stevens institute of technology. i was curious about what women's lacrosse was "supposed" to look like, a confusion borne from my experience at that other half of a game: a debacle of mean-spiritedness that illuminated some things about high schooler morality but very little about lacrosse. it was a dumb argument that metastasized into spectacle, a strange outgrowth of berkeley high schoolers' general inability to adequately answer the question: why not?

one theme of all these stories is that berkeley high's educational model was largely "fuck around and find out." as a comfortably middle-class white kid, i typically "found out" about power relationships by being on the right side of them - by learning that the person putatively in charge of you was not, and that there was a whole universe of agency that i could learn to exercise.

most of the school's black kids had a very, very different experience.

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.

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.