There were five of us, or was it six? Six, until one of the ‘gang’ moved away at the end of our eighth grade year. The name, ‘Rock 99’, was bestowed upon us in middle-school by an underclasswoman; it was not meant as a compliment. We, she’d said, thought we were as cool as the popular at the time rock station out of New York City, Rock 99. Of course, what she didn’t know was that I, for one, had never heard Rock 99. Living out on the farm in New Kingston, where TV and radio reception was extremely limited, if I was lucky, and the wind was in the right direction, I could get a Binghamton station on Sunday nights, maybe, that played oldies from the fifties and sixties. But, most of the time, we only got WGY from Schenectady, which did matter, even if the music they played wasn’t cool: WGY announced school closings for snow. WGY played music my mom and dad liked, from their era, the forties, or elevator style music from the fifties. WGY announced the daily death tolls from Vietnam.
We – Rock 99 – were a loose gang, I suppose, of friendly, but not always too close or friendly girls; there would be pairs of intense friendships that developed within our numbers but we shared almost every class for four years in middle school. Most of us had known one another, however, since kindergarten or before, with one exception, a girl whose family had moved to town prior to our entering sixth grade. As we began those in middle school, years that were made much longer by an ‘innovation’ I think they called tracking, breaking our class into three sections by reading and math scores; the groups were designated simply – and painfully, A, B and C, with the smarter kids in A, and etc. This, it was thought, would to help us move more quickly ahead, and help the teachers, too, increasing efficiency.
Maybe it helped the teachers, but it didn’t help us. We always knew who the smart kids were in our class of just under fifty souls, but we also liked each other, or at least I did, and I think – I like to believe – that most of us did, like one another. The new system, A, B, C, ended that, and the competition between the various members of Rock 99 turned what were normal peer friendships into something more like an uneasy truce of the Capulets and Montagues, without the knives or bloodshed.
We were ambitious, smart pre-teens, and we loved doing well in school. It was expected, by our teachers and families. We had crushes on boys in grades above us, and in our own, but were not yet entangled in romance to the point where it distracted us from homework. We didn’t have middle-school sports, and all other activities happened during the regular school day. Most of the ’99’ gang came from families whose parents owned or co-owned small businesses in our town; most of our mothers worked, or had an education beyond high school, which wasn’t common at that time, in our small, rural community.
As we began high school, our class was a hot mess of angry teenagers who overwhelmingly no longer liked, trusted, or wanted to work with or for one another. The ‘A’ kids were disliked as snobs, snobs who thought they were better than everyone else, and indeed the school administration, in creating their noxious system of A, B, and C had designated us as such, at least academically. Yet their rankings had also revealed what was plain to see if we had known to look, a truth we couldn’t acknowledge as children: that if one looked beneath the surface most of the kids in C group were from poor families, families who struggled. They struggled, too, in school as well as out of it. The B kids, well, they were so likable, unlike us As, not stuck up yet stuck in between. They mostly had parents who worked for A group dads, in jobs that paid by the hour. And the A kids, well, would anyone have felt comfortable pointing out that we generally lived in houses where each sibling had their own bedroom, and a modern mid-century kitchen, possibly even a pool? Not in my hearing.
The lines that the school had drawn had inadvertently revealed things we didn’t want to know, or see, as the children we were, but there they were. It was the subtext under everything, never spoken, always present. Haves, have-nots, and have enoughs.
The name Rock 99 stuck; it was used to caption a photo of four of the bunch our senior year. By then, our divided, chaotic class had settled into a kind of peace, but the hostility, the hate, the dislike – with a few exceptions – never really faded; those four years of categorizing us all did permanent, lasting damage. It damaged and pigeon holed us all, whichever group we’d been slotted into.
I believe it is as important – if not more so – to teach kids how to respect and love one another, to get along, to settle disputes peaceably and well, as it is to improve math and reading scores. Our connections and bonds to our peer group are essential in creating lives of meaning and depth. We need our friends, friends with memories that are – if not identical – similar to us. There are generational differences and commonalities that bind and matter, deeply.
We liked one another; I believe that. Not all of us, it wasn’t a Disney cartoon, but it was real. And then it was not. What they did to us didn’t help anyone academically, in my view; all it did was divide us, hurt us, make us fear one another, and that’s not cool at all.