[I ended the second part of “Going to a Swiss International School” with a description of our after-school snack at the Collège du Léman: pain au chocolat. I was getting into some of the pleasures of CDL, and the next bit is the weekend jaunts we interns went on and the ski trips during the winter. That’s where Part 3 starts.
[Because my account is continuous, I suggest reading it from the start rather than picking it up in the middle. So, I recommend going back to Part 1 on 29 April and Part 2 on 2 May before reading Part 3 below. Explanations in the early parts will inform what comes in the later installments.]
On many weekends, the school organized short day trips to towns in the nearby area for the interns, especially if they were on the same rail line as the Geneva-Versoix train. We went to small towns like Nyon in Vaud and large ones like Geneva and Lausanne, the capital of Vaud. Everyone had to go on these outings—no one would be left at school to look after kids (unless someone was sick in the infirmary).
The little ones would be chaperoned—and sometimes taken to a different destination—while the high-schoolers were set free to roam the town and return in time for the train home. (One of our minders held the tickets.) Mostly, we just headed for a place to eat—the Mövenpicks in Geneva and Lausanne.
There was also a Wimpy bar in Geneva where we went for burgers. Wimpy’s was a British chain, but the burgers and chips (British for ‘french fries’) were passable.
The Mövenpick Restaurants were Swiss fast-food places—if you can envision such a contradictory concept. Mövenpick, whose name comes from die Möwe, German for ‘seagull,’ because the service concept was said to be inspired by the feeding behavior of the bird, served burgers and pizza, but it also served steak tartare and salade niçoise plus wine, beer, and cocktails, and the pizza selections included Hawaiian pizza . . . with pineapple, a strange idea to an American kid in 1963. (Of course, Hawaiian pizza was the cause of some ribbing of Stan Thom, my Hawaiian roomie—all good-natured, to be sure. Oh, and Stan never heard of pizza with pineapple topping, either.)
(The Mövenpicks are gone now; the company became a hotel-and-resort firm. One of the restaurants opened in the Times Square area of New York back in the ’80s, but it didn’t last long. The Geneva Mövenpick became our hang-out of choice when I transferred to the International School in ’64.
(The Wimpy bars aren’t around anymore as I knew them, either. Wimpy’s saved my life when I was in London on my own once in the days before credit cards were accepted worldwide and I was running out of money. A burger and chips at Wimpy’s was cheap.)
In the winter, the school also put together ski trips, both one-day and overnight excursions. We went to places all over the immediate area, including several times to Chamonix, which is in France but just 50 miles southeast of Geneva, less than a 2¾-hour train ride from Versiox. (Chamonix is in the shadow of Mont Blanc, the most famous mountain of the French Alps and the highest point in Europe. When I was at Ecolint, I had a view of Mont Blanc out of my dorm room window!)
On one of these ski trips—a day-long outing as I recall, though I don’t remember where we went this time—I discovered that my skis were damaged. At that time, state-of-the-art skis were still wood, but covered with an epoxy veneer. While I was packing my gear, I noticed that the epoxy was splitting away from the wood base. I decided not to take the skis, but to rent a pair when we arrived at the slopes.
When I got there, I decided this would be a great opportunity to try the new ski technology that had only recently been introduced: metal skis. Though first marketed in 1950, Head skis, the leader in metal skis, were still experimental and expensive; by the 1960s, however, they were becoming popular with sport and competitive skiers and at the 1964 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria, the downhill event was won by a Swiss skier on Heads.
So I rented a pair when I arrived, made one run down the mountain—this was a wooded trail, not an open slope, and the piste was scooped out like a little bobsled run. I immediately saw that the metal Heads were too fast for me and I couldn’t control them.
I was actually afraid I’d fall at speed or run into a tree because I couldn’t maneuver fast enough. I went down the hill in short stages and as soon as I reached the bottom, traded the Heads in for wood-and-epoxy skis for the rest of the day.
That was the closest I ever came to possibly hurting myself skiing; the next close call came that spring in Austria (near, ironically, Innsbruck). That story’s coming up.
The whole school was preparing for just such another ski weekend—a long weekend, as I recall—when one of the most serious misfortunes in which I was involved at CDL developed. I don’t remember where we were going that weekend . . . because I never got there.
Everyone had been preparing for the trip all morning and we were gathering for our transportation to the train. I think we were taking a chartered bus directly to Geneva rather than the local train to change at Geneva’s Cornavin station. The staffer or teacher in charge of Doug’s year-group saw that he wasn’t with them and asked me if I knew what was holding him up.
I said I didn’t but I’d go to his room and check on him. I ran back up to the dorm and found Doug in bed, very sick. How no one had reported this, I don’t know, but I immediately did so and went up to the third floor to get the nurse, Fräulein Ursula. Doug had croaked out that he was having trouble breathing and I shouted at Ursula, “Er kann nicht atmen! Mein bruder kann nicht atmen!”
Somehow, someone determined that Doug was very ill and a doctor was summoned. I had to decide if I was going to leave him to the care of the school authorities and get on the bus, which was ready to depart, or stay with him in the dorm. Obviously, I chose the latter—even though I knew there was nothing I could actually do for him.
The doctor arrived and diagnosed pneumonia and ultimately Doug was transported to a hospital in Geneva because he was too sick to stay either in his dorm room or in the school infirmary. Sometime in all this activity, someone called our parents and I told them what was happening. Of course, they were freaked.
They made arrangements to come to Geneva right away; I think they must have flown from Frankfurt because I can’t see them having driven the seven hours from Koblenz. (I don’t know if they thought of this part in the hectic rush, but Dad would end up commuting back and forth while Mom stayed in Geneva; I can’t imagine him driving back and then making the round trip several times alone.)
Douglas turned out to have had double pneumonia. His life was actually in danger during the early hours and days. Mother and Dad went straight to the hospital when they arrived in Geneva and then checked into the Hotel Beau-Rivage. I think they must have come to Versoix to check on me after they left Douglas. After all, Doug was not yet 15, but I was only about to turn 17.
Meanwhile, I had discovered that the school was actually closed. When I decided to stay with Doug, I expected not only that he’d be staying in the dorm or infirmary, but that there’d be people around to look after us and see that we got fed.
Nope. No one was going to be on the campus. Anyone who wasn’t going on the ski weekend was given the weekend off. The kitchen was closed and unstaffed. Once Doug went to the hospital, I was like Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone—except he was at home and I was in an empty school building!
Culkin also had a script. I was winging it . . . all alone. Fortunately, one of the teachers—I forget now who he was, I’m sorry to say—who lived in Versoix right near the school, when he learned that I was on my own, invited me to hang out at his apartment during the day until the skiers all returned and the school reopened. He had a couple of young children, and I became a sort of ad hoc baby-sitter.
As soon as Douglas was out of danger, Dad had to go back to Germany to resume his duties. Mom stayed in Geneva for three weeks while Doug recuperated (which actually lasted for a couple of months, all the way through spring break, but he was home for that part—just restricted to a quiet life) with Dad making the trip from Koblenz and back every weekend.
Douglas finished the year at CDL, but he decided to return to the States and his Pennsylvania prep school after that. I don’t know if the pneumonia incident had impelled him not to stick it out in Europe or if it was the general experience with CDL—or maybe the fact that he was just not as adventuresome as I was. I, on the other hand, wasn’t about to give up on my incipient adventure because of one bad . . . okay, awful, misadventure.
After visiting hours at the hospital were over, Mom would come out to Versoix and take me to dinner—as much for her benefit (she was alone, too) as for mine. This is when Ali al-Sabah met her.
Mom would always wait for me in the entrance hall of the admin section on the first floor, and I’d come down and meet her and we’d go into Geneva for dinner. (I don’t remember this, but she must have rented a car while she was staying in Geneva because I can’t see her taking the train every evening and I don’t recall a cab waiting in front of the school.)
I said that Ali (that would be Prince Ali—but I don’t recall ever calling him that when we were acquainted) and I were friends at this time. We actually used to discuss—not debate or dispute—the Arab-Israeli relationship! One could at that time—before the Six-Day War (June 1967) and the Yom Kippur War (October 1973) when the situation hadn’t gotten so fraught—and we talked frequently.
So one evening, when I had to go meet my mother, Ali went downstairs with me. After that, he accompanied me nearly every evening for the remainder of Mom’s three-week stay in Geneva. I suppose Mom asked him to join us for dinner, but I don’t remember if she did or that he ever came with is.
Of course, he never said anything overt about my mother, except to say he thought she was a nice lady, but it became obvious little by little what was going on. I don’t know if Mom noticed—we certainly never talked about it—and it ended abruptly when my folks took Doug back to Germany before spring vacation.
Mom did invite my three roomies—I think Gridley was gone by this time, but a new fourth was introduced; my recollection is that he wasn’t an American, breaking up our little squad of Musketeers—for a dinner out in the city. She and Dad had discovered a place that had wonderful fondue—cholesterol wasn’t recognized as a problem in those early 1960s—and that’s where we headed.
The special treat was that the restaurant, whose name I no longer remember (if it’s even still there) was on a small island in the middle of the Rhone, reachable from either bank by a bridge. Oddly, the island has no actual name; it’s just called “L’Ile,” “The Island.”
We had a great time, eating and talking for hours. Getting out of school and getting into Geneva was a terrific treat for us interns. It’s not as if we were prisoners or that life at CDL was unbearable—I’ve given you an idea that it wasn’t wonderful, but we were pretty resilient, and it was temporary. But Versoix is a tiny, tiny town and getting off campus just to go into Versoix was still very claustrophobic. So, we busted out a little.
Mom brought us back to school in the late evening—not so late that our dormmates weren’t still up and goofing around. As I said before, my roommates’ and my room was the gathering place for the high school interns, so as soon as the four of us got back, everyone wandered into our room.
We were shooting the bull as usual when I noticed that the group was thinning out. One or two at a time, everyone but the four occupants of the room began to leave. No one said anything, they just drifted away. I thought later that maybe they were miffed that my mom had invited my three roommates but not the rest of the interns.
It took a while, but someone finally told me what had happened. As we were talking, the room began to reek of garlic! The sauces for the fondue—we’d had beef fondue—had been generously seasoned with garlic, but because we’d all had the same meal—fondue is a communal feast—none of us even noticed the aroma of our breaths. But the others all did, and after a while, they just couldn’t stand it! (I’m not convinced that a little scheming hadn’t gone into this action, however.)
Douglas went home to Germany after leaving the hospital with orders to take it easy and not exert himself for the next few months. The problem was going to be that we had planned a spring vacation trip to Austria that was going to include a spot of spring skiing in the Tyrol. Doug was an avid skier, just as I was in those days. He also wasn’t great at denying himself and delaying gratification—not at 15.
There were two potentially saving graces: our vacation started in Vienna and Salzburg, where we went exclusively for sightseeing and tourism. (I took a train from Geneva and met my family in Vienna. This was the trip on which I think I heard two Swiss passengers speaking Romansh [see Part 1].)
Then, however, we drove to the ski resort of Kitzbühel, a little village near Innsbruck (which would host the Winter Olympics later that year and then again in 1976). That’s where saving grace #2 came in: Doug couldn’t go onto the slopes without equipment and ski togs—and he’d left his behind in Koblenz.
In any case, while Dad and I had our little ski break, Doug stayed down in Kitzbühel with Mom (who’d decided before this that she couldn’t keep up with us boys so she would enjoy the après-ski activities—shopping, window-shopping, and Glühwein by the fire).
Dad and I had tried to team up with another family from Koblenz, that of Lieutenant Colonel Ric Lamp (1923-2013), the U.S. Air Force liaison officer with the German III Corps based in Koblenz, but they were too aggressive for us, so we took our own time.
Spring skiing is different from the winter sport. The sun comes out and the air warms up and the snow covering on the mountains melts a little. Then the sun starts to go down as evening approaches, and the damp snow refreezes into a layer of icy crust, which is slick and fast. I was a better skier than Dad and even I was losing my footing and control of my skis, which were running out in front of me.
There was also a fog on the mountain, also something of a hazard with spring skiing, so we couldn’t see very far in front of us. In fact, we couldn’t see past the tips of our own skis. When on one short run—we were taking the piste down the mountain in short stages for our own safety . . . and sanity—we stopped and found that the ends of our skis were literally hanging over the edge of a precipice.
That’s when we decided that the conditions were too much for our level of expertise. We took our skis off, listened for the sound of the chairlift and followed the towers back up the mountain—we hadn’t gone very far down—and rode the lift back down to the bottom.
Thus ended our foray into springtime alpine skiing. (You might think that this would be a third dissuasion for my brother to evade the doctor’s instructions. Not a chance! It would have been an enticement to defy common sense and personal safety.)
After our trip to Austria, we went back home and Doug and I then returned to Versoix on the train. Doug finished out the year, as I said, and after the summer, he went back to the States, coming back to Germany for school vacations.
After spring break, there were only a couple of months before final exams. For the seniors among the Americans—I’m not sure how this works for the Brits and the French—final acceptance at college was dependent on their final grades and we juniors had college applications coming up in the fall, and that would depend in how we finished our junior year. So that’s where our minds were focused.
Then came Clivaz. Midway through the spring, he announced that there was going to be some kind of multi-school scholastic competition—a sort of international quiz bowl—and he wanted us to enter as representatives of CDL.
Well, you can imagine that no one really wanted to put ourselves out to “represent” CDL. We didn’t have any “be true to your school” feeling, so as one, we rejected Clivaz’s behest. We told him that it was too near finals and would take away a lot of our vital study time. This had the virtue of being true.
Well, if Clivaz was pissed when I resigned as a Prefect, he was incensed when all the upperclassmen and -women together wouldn’t fulfill his wish. I’m sure he saw it as a personal betrayal of some kind—and I wouldn’t doubt that he somehow also saw in the refusal an American hand.
It wasn’t long after this that I was called into Clivaz’s office. I don’t remember the exact chain of events, but basically, he had seen me enter the building by the front door and not through the basement to change into my slippers [see Part 2]. The fact is that I had: I was in a hurry and took a short cut and the headmaster was standing right there. No way around it. What came next was a shock, however.
Oh, and he added a few other violations, but they must have been pretty minor because I don’t recall what they were. He declared me “a bad influence”—“une mauvaise influence”—the same charge laid on Gridley Strong before he was sent to Siberia [see Part 1]. I think he was just pissed at the rejection of the quiz bowl event—though I was by no means the instigator or the leader of the little rebellion.
He told me he was calling my parents and telling them to remove me from CDL. So my parents made another trip to Versoix and we four had a meeting in Clivaz’s office; Peter may have been there, but I don’t recall his presence. There was a long discussion—I was already accepted at Ecolint by this time and Dad and Mother didn’t want to queer that pitch, as the Brits might say.
My folks tried to mollify Clivaz and I explained that my action wasn’t in any way a rebellion, just an indulgence because I was late for something and thought I might have earned a little leeway for my good record. (Okay, I was grasping at straws. I was also only 17, so I thought a little contrition might actually work.)
Clivaz asked me directly if I would promise not to break any more rules for the remainder of the year. My parents looked at me expectantly and I sat silently and contemplated my options. I didn’t really want to make that promise, but I said I would try. Clivaz said that that wasn’t really good enough and my parents looked daggers at me. (Later, they told me how pissed they were at my answer.)
The final verdict was that I would go home for the rest of classes, endeavor to study on my own, and return for exams in a few weeks. I would take my finals and then leave CDL immediately after my last exam. So that’s what I did. I’d never been expelled or suspended from anything, much less school, until then (something I couldn’t say again in 10 years—but that’s irrelevant to this tale.)
So I did my exam prep at home, and when I returned from my—what should I call it? Suspension? When I got back to CDL, I learned that I was to be put into what the Brits called “Coventry.” Because I was a bad influence, I was ostracized and actually made to go live on the third floor with the younger kids—who, of course, weren’t supposed to talk to me.
Of course, Clivaz and his staff didn’t really have the control over the students that he seemed to think they did, and though I did have to sleep in a room to myself among the little ones, the seniors downstairs invited me to hang out in their enclave at the end of the second-floor hall. I couldn’t do that openly in the part of the dorm where I used to live—it would be too obvious and everyone there would get into trouble for associating with me.
But the senior section was closed off, so it wasn’t as visible—and my classmates and former roomies came down to join in the bull sessions and gab fests we held. Even upstairs, Fräulein Ursula invited me to sit in the infirmary if I wished and chat with her—the only grown up on that floor.
Many of the little kids also stopped by my room and asked why I was there and got to talking, even though they were instructed not to. One boy who came several times was the younger brother of the Persian teen I mentioned before, the “tough guy” [see Part 2]. (I wouldn’t be surprised if he wound up a Revolutionary Guard or something like that after the revolution in Iran.) The little brother would stand in my doorway and ask me questions.
One day, the teenager stopped me and said I’d better stop talking to his little brother or he’d “break my face.” That’s the translation of a crude French expression, je vais te casser la gueule, which means literally, ‘I’m going to break your face,’ using the word for an animal’s face or head, but which threatens a beating. I told him that I wasn’t inviting his brother to stop by, so if he really wanted him to stop talking to me, the older boy should talk to him. It never came up again before I left.
There was one other thing to do in regard to this situation. I had to meet with the International School headmaster to smooth over this mess with them so they wouldn’t withdraw my acceptance for the next year. I don’t remember when this occurred—I don’t remember my parents coming to Geneva again after the meeting with Clivaz before I went home, but maybe they did.
In any case, the interview happened, and I didn’t have the impression that the Ecolint people were really much concerned and that this was just a pro-forma meeting. Maybe they just wanted to have a look at me to make sure I wasn’t some kind of James Dean from Rebel Without a Cause. Or worse, Malcolm McDowell from if . . . .. I’m not, of course. (No, really . . . .)
In any case, I finished my exams successfully, left Versoix, and have never been back. CDL never came up in conversation either at Ecolint after I started there or at home in the ensuing 50-some-odd years.
The school is still operating and has even thrived. It now takes K through 12 and has many new buildings and programs. Clivaz doesn’t run it anymore, but he’s still honored as the founder—and he and his family converted Les Roches, the Siberia of the old days, into an apparently successful international training school for the hotel industry (with two additional branches overseas).
The summer of 1964, my second in Europe, was a split occasion. I stayed with my parents in Koblenz, then I went back to the States to visit colleges. My dad’s sisters hosted me and took me around the schools in their regions—and I visited my mom’s mother in New York City, and she took me out to Flushing Meadows-Corona Park to see the World’s Fair. Then I came back to Germany.
I started my senior year, 1964-65, at the International School of Geneva. As I said earlier, Ecolint, the oldest of the international schools and one of the best known, had only one campus in 1964. It was located about a 15-minute tram ride from downtown Geneva, right around the southern tip of the lake, within sight of the famous Jet d’Eau.
La Grande Boissière, the name for the original campus which we never used (it was just Ecolint to us), was laid out along the Route de Chêne, where the main entrance, an elaborate double iron gate, was located. The current campus is far more elaborate than it was in my day, so I’ll lay out the ground plan as I remember it from 1964.
Route de Chêne runs more or less east and west from the direction of the lake in the west toward the border town of Annemasse, France, in the east. As you passed through the entrance gates, on the south side of the road, the school was laid out around a courtyard that in the U.S. would be called The Quad. Essentially there were four buildings (depending on how you counted).
The dining hall and kitchen was on the left forming an ell with the Vieux Maison which was the building that housed the classrooms for the English side (on the first floor) and the boy’s dorm on the upper floor. (That was either one or two buildings, since they’re connected. At lunch, the students, both interns and externs, entered the dining hall from the courtyard; at breakfast and dinner, the interns went in through the connecting doors from the Vieux Maison.)
A little further in on the right was the administration building with the offices for both the English side and the French side. If I remember right, the changing rooms for PE were also in this structure, as was the library. The French-side classrooms were a few yards further on on the right.
On the far south side of the courtyard was the playing field, basically just a great lawn that could be used for soccer/football or field hockey (played by both boys and girls in Europe).
On the grassy slope between the edge of the courtyard and the field was (and still is, according to current photos) the Greek Theatre (le Théâtre Grec), a stone amphitheater where performances and convocations were held in good weather—such as the leaving ceremony that stood in for my high school commencement in June 1965.
The girl’s dorm was off a little distance from the main campus—still on the grounds, but away from the courtyard—by itself along a footpath known as Le Petit Chemin that was a sort of back way from the dorm and the courtyard to a spot on the Route de Chêne where you could cross over the road.
There was a small grouping of shops overlooking the lake that included the Auberge de la Poste, a little inn where I’d go on a late Sunday morning and sit and smoke over a glass of wine or beer and read. That’s not what the Petit Chemin was for, but that’s what it is in my memory. I never told anyone where I went for a couple of hours on Sunday.
My dorm room was in the middle of the of the hall and my roommate, as I related earlier, was Mark Dyen, the son of a Yale prof on sabbatical somewhere in Asia [see Part 1].
I decorated my part of the room with a colorful blanket hung on the wall and pictures of Washington, D.C., cut from a magazine, pinned to it. It wasn’t that I was homesick, but I’ve always been something of a Washington chauvinist.
I don’t remember much about Mark’s pre-Ecolint life, but I do remember that, because of his father’s specialty, he had spent some of his middle school years in Indonesia—where, he was astonished to discover that women regularly doffed their tops as soon as it started to rain to prevent them from getting wet! (Remember, Mark was like 12 at the time.)
This is the room, by the way, that had the view of Mont Blanc, just over 50 miles away, out the window. Can you imagine waking up to that every morning? (My view out the dorm window at CDL was . . . bars. Clivaz had installed iron bars on all the windows of the dorm, even though they were on the second story. I’m sure the official line was that it for the security of the students and their possessions—but I think it was to keep us from climbing out.)
Mark’s and my Ecolint dorm room was where our classmate would entertain us with les leçons des quéquette-couilles and the accounts of his early attempts to speak French [see Part 2]. But Mark and I would also get into these elaborate bull sessions where we’d start batting around some silly idea that would grow into an immense, detailed plan for an absurd project—a literary Rube Goldberg contraption.
We’d usually be howling with laughter for a couple of hours at our own clever inanity. The one I recall the clearest was the outline for a sequel to the Bible (i.e., the New Testament, the follow-up to . . . well, the Old Testament—except it was only “The Testament” until then).
Sometime in the early part of the school year, while the weather was still nice, there must have been a long break—five days or a week. I don’t know what it could have been, but the school organized a trip to Provence, including Arles, where painter Vincent van Gogh (1853-90) worked for a year.
Besides Arles and van Gogh’s Yellow House, we started in Avignon, I think, where a bunch of us danced on the remains of the bridge that sticks out into the Rhone (Sur le Pont d’Avignon / L’on y danse, l’on y danse).
Then we saw the Pont du Gard, a Roman aqueduct from the 1st century CE; the Camargue, where the gardians (French “cowboys”) ride the Camargue horses, the famous white Camarguais; and Les Baux, where aluminum ore was first discovered in 1821, giving the substance the name bauxite after the town.
We may have flown from Geneva to Provence and back—which was a noteworthy experience. Regular readers of ROT may remember my description of flying into West Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport in either “Berlin Memoir, Part 1,” 16 December 2016, or “The Big Lift,” 31 August 2017. Well, flying into Geneva’s Cointrin Airport bore a marked similarity.
The difference is that Tempelhof was in the middle of downtown Berlin and planes had to fly in over rooftops and then drop down precipitously to land, imitating a VTOL craft. Cointrin, Geneva’s airport, isn’t in the city like that, but it’s surrounded by mountains, situated in a basin, and the landing is very much the same.
I had my heart in my throat whenever I had to land at either airport . . . until I got a little used to it. The feeling of—let’s call it concern—never entirely went away, but I learned to fake being cool.
The classes at Ecolint were fine; there was no shadow of the kinds of disappointments and inadequacies of CDL. (No one asked me if I dyed my hair!) The teachers I had were all knowledgeable about their subjects and good at presenting them. They were a mix of Americans, Brits, and Continentals, depending on the subject.
For the Americans and others prepping for the SAT’s, our English teachers would have been American; classes like science, math, and philosophy were mostly taught by Brits; and the language teachers were native speakers—German was taught by a German, French by a Frenchman, and so on.
I didn’t take a science class at Ecolint as I’d done the required high school sciences after physics at CDL. (I’d had bio and chem in the States and I wasn’t interested in a science elective.)
My math track had been screwed up, not by Ecolint or even CDL, but my New Jersey prep school: in most U.S. high schools, students take algebra I, then geometry, then algebra II, and finally trigonometry; my prep school did algebra I in freshman year, then algebra II, then geometry in the junior year—which would have been fine if I’d finished high school there.
I left after sophomore year and CDL couldn’t accommodate me in a sophomore-level geometry class, so I took trig in my junior year. (That was “Bozo”’s class.) When I got to Ecolint, my math program was all irretrievably muddled, so I was shunted off into a statistics class. (I never did take a geometry class!) I don’t remember anything about statistics except some terms (“margin of error,” “mean deviation”)—but I don’t know what they mean or how to calculate them!
Oh, wait! I do remember one thing I learned in statistics. I don’t remember the context, but I remember the teacher explaining what the word meant: tessellation. Actually, the topic came up in reverse: he introduced the concept of figures fitting together like tiles and why some, like squares and equilateral triangles, do, and some others, like circles or irregular shapes don’t. Then he told us the word for this phenomenon.
(To tell the truth, I remembered the definition for years, but had forgotten the word tessellation itself and kept searching for it unsuccessfully—until computers came along and I could search the definition and hit on the word that way. Now I’ll probably never forget it. Not that I have a lot of use for the word.)
I do, though, remember a lot of fundamental stuff about philosophy—the basics. I seem to have done a paper for that class on Plato and his philosophies because I have a stack of books on him, his writings, and his legacy in modern thought. I don’t recall what the topic of the paper was, but I must have really gotten stuck into it because I not only bought those books, but kept them all these years.
I do remember that I really loved that course: I felt as if I were learning not so much how to think, by why we think the ways we do. Years later, when I was at the end of my college years I took a course in basic psychology—just for the edification. (I also took a college philosophy course.) I decided that while psych explained how our brains worked, philosophy endeavored to explain how our minds worked.
(I had an experience from the Ecolint philosophy class similar to the statistics thing with tessellation. The class had a discussion of a word or phrase that’s commonly used to refer to a larger concept of which it is a part.
(This is the practice of using ‘Washington’ to mean ‘the United States government’ or ‘the Pentagon’ to mean ‘the Defense Department’; it’s also saying ‘suits’ to mean ‘businessmen’ or ‘executives.’ I’d forgotten the name for this habit, however. Years later, I came across metonym (for the substitute word itself; metonymy for the practice).
Obviously, my acuity in French continued to increase. This is the year in which I had my first dream in French.
I still have a very vivid recollection of that occasion. I awoke in the morning and, though I didn’t remember the dream itself, I did remember that it was all in French—and I sprouted a huge grin. (Later, in college, when I got drunk, I spoke only French—or so people told me afterwards. But that’s a story for another post. In fact, I recount one related anecdote in “Short Takes: Theater War Stories,” 6 December 2010.)
[Well, I’ve made it to my senior year and to the world-famous International School of Geneva. This will mark a change in the timbre of this memoir, as I’m sure readers will notice.
[The
fourth installment of “Going to a Swiss International School” will be published
on Rick On Theater on 8 May. Please come back then for Part 4. I’ll be starting off by recounting some of
the things the Ecolint students did in downtown Geneva—and, no, that didn’t
include capping the Jet d’Eau. (There
is, however, a tale I tell on myself coming up.)]
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