At the start of the third year of Chehalem Valley Academy's young life, two things happened, I became a senior and we got a new vice principal.This is Dale Hosley. He replaced "Mr. Hamilton" whom had been there the previous two years. Mr. Hosley or "the Hoz" as we fondly referred to him as, couldn't wait to get his feet wet. He was ready to jump right in, anxious to give this administration position his all, get to know the kids and be our fearless, likable, leader.
Early on, during one of the orientation talks that take place during the first day or two I saw an opportunity and I seized it.
See, since we were a new, small, private, start up school with kids attending at different levels and with different educational backgrounds, sometimes the school had to supplement a student's class schedule with an "independent study" class. This was simply to help fill in the blanks for cases where a student who was a junior maybe never had a Health class that all the other juniors took the year before. Or say maybe you were a senior needing to graduate but there was a time conflict in which you needed to take two different classes that were going on at the exact same time. Say, like Geography. That was me. I needed Geography, but Geography was a Freshman class and since the school didn't even exist when I was a Freshman, I hadn't taken it. And Geography happened to conflict with Senior English. "Independent study" here I come! This translated into one thing. Paces.
These are paces. They are made by a homeschooling curriculum called ACE (Accelerated Christian Education). One year of paces in just one subject meant you had to complete about twelve little booklets. The format was identical for every pace. You read several paragraphs, answered a couple questions about what you just read, and after about seven pages or so there would be a checkup. This would ask you all those same questions again, maybe worded a little differently. After you answered these twelve to fifteen questions you would start a new section in the pace that was identical to the first. There were three checkups per pace and at the end of the pace there was a self test. This was all the questions from all the checkups combined. You did this, you studied it and then you took your pace into the office and said you were ready for Geography test #1. You sat in the office while you took your test, which was identical to the self-test, turned in your test and then received a new pace-pace #2 and then you started all over. This was tedious and time consuming and independent so you had to be disciplined to stay on course and ensure that you completed all twelve paces and tests by the end of the year. We hated paces. So much reading, writing, re-writing, memorizing and testing!One morning at the beginning of a class that "the Hoz" was teaching, I think it was junior/senior Bible, somehow paces came up. He asked if there were anymore questions about paces. I raised my hand. I told him that Mr. Hamilton had only required us to do the checkups and tests and that we didn't have to do all the meaningless, mundane writing in between. This was a lie. "So, is that okay if we do it like that again this year?" He thought that was fine and responded as if I had just given him an inside tip into how things were run. He seemed to appreciate the tip. "Listen up," I heard him say as he explained this "standard" way of doing paces to the rest of the school at the start of the next chapel in which everyone would've been gathered. Most students thought this was a new way of doing this paces year and were excited about it. A few students who had heard me "ask my question" new this was bunk. They must've either thought that Mr. Hamilton had been giving me special treatment since they all had always answered all the questions in all the paces, or they thought they were stupid and had been doing extra unnecessary work the previous two years, or they knew I was lying. But they also would've known that they were going to be benefiting from this lie, so they kept their mouth shut. I sooo wanted to tell everyone "secretly" that I was the mastermind behind all this and that they could all thank me for my brilliance and lack of conscience. However, I knew it would never stay hush-hush and I'd be outed, punished and eternally bound to doing paces every Friday night of my senior year. So I kept quiet. So did everyone else, no one asked, no one told. Not even Donna, the faithful, loyal and much loved school secretary who had the mundane task of correcting most paces asked questions. It went over like...like...whatever the opposite of a lead balloon might be. It went over like a hot air balloon, which was fitting since that's what it was, hot air.
