Page 11 - 1996

n the big league now
Five years ago, you most likely found yourself sitting on the top of the totem pole in elementary school. You were the 'top gun', the 'big cheese', the 'head hancho' of the grades below you. You could locate every room in the school. You knew the name of every teacher and, more important, they knew your name! You had sat beside your best friend in every class since kindergarten. Then things quickly changed in the fall of '95. You entered high school. Sud- denly, you found yourself walking into the wrong classroom. The rest of the other students looked SO HUGE- especially those Sr. football players who called themselves 'The Fight- ing Owls'. You were no longer automatically placed on a sports team. You had to go through tryouts. If you were lucky, you might have passed your best friend, what's her name?, in the hall. How did they ever expect you to learn the names of over 100 teachers? Furthermore, most likely it wasn't a positive sign if most of the teachers knew your name after the first week in grade nine! You ate in the cafeteria and big guys in gold and black sweaters asked you to clean up your mess. You were low man on the totem pole. This had to be fiction - no, it was more than that - it was STRANGER THAN FICTION/