Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Flint Artifacts: Powers High School Detention Notice



7 comments:

  1. Wow Gordie! I am stunned! I think the only detention I ever got was from Sr. Rosalyn. I still have a shiver of fear when her name is spoken (or typed)! I can't believe you kept that all these years!

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  2. And ya know...Sister Rosalyn is still there...in charge of attendance. My wife was afraid to call my daughter in sick!

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  3. I suppose I'm a few months late in commenting on this, but I can't decide which is the better artifact, Sr. Ros herself or Gordie's detention notice! Man that woman was frightening - once she had me get up in front of the class and practice handwriting skills on the board. Another time I had just returned to school after having bad bronchitis and she threatened to send me to the office for coughing. Is that horrible or what?! AND she made my sister take off her jewelry because it was "distracting." Oh the fond memories.

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  4. Wow--as a former Powers teacher who gave a ton of those detention notices from 1977 to 1990, I can't help but chuckle. Surely there were better ways to secure a student's cooperation! Hmm . . . maybe if we had played Frank Sinatra and Lawrence Welk albums during detention, students would have done anything to avoid them!

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  5. Mr. Morse, it's good to hear from you! I had you my freshman year, and as you can see from the detention notice, I probably didn't apply myself. I enjoyed the class, though. I remember doing research on the original reviews of various Broadway plays, which was a great assignment.

    I have several of these detention slips, as well as a deficiency notice in Choir from Mr. K. You have to really go out of your way to get a grade warning in choir. Not sure what it was that I did.

    For me, the worst part of detention was that I couldn't take the school bus home or get a ride with friends. And that meant the Dupont Street bus, which was always an adventure.

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  6. Mr. Morse!! I only had you for one quarter in freshman year, but I remember you very well :) I was still pretty shy that year so I wasn't one of the privileged recipients of your detention notices. You probably remember my cousin Patti Stewart and at least some of the Hirn's.

    Gordon, you're not the only one who got a deficiency notice from Mr. K. I tend to think it was more about what we DIDN'T do rather than anything we actually did do..

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  7. I was a straight A student, never got in trouble, always respectful, but who lived quite a ways away and was often tardy... I was smart enough to write my own tardy notes from day 1 which effectively foiled Sr. Rosalyn's forgery analysis. Boy she was a tough cookie but after becoming a regular visitor to her office, I found her to be quite nice :)

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Thanks for commenting. I moderate comments, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You might enjoy my book about Flint called "Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City," a Michigan Notable Book for 2014 and a finalist for the 33rd Annual Northern California Book Award for Creative NonFiction. Filmmaker Michael Moore described Teardown as "a brilliant chronicle of the Mad Maxization of a once-great American city." More information about Teardown is available at www.teardownbook.com.