I didn’t know this media personality in Sangamon’s major media market went to my middle school. He did a feature for Good Morning Sangamon about going back to Rotterdam Middle School where he remembers being a sports legend but everybody there remembers something different. I had never heard of the guy, but it was an interesting outside look at my middle school. He did fly down to film the segment (or maybe he was in town anyway). It was obviously meant to be comedic, but I liked seeing my middle school in a TV segment, including pictures of him in the same football uniform I wore!

It was a little weird, though, in that it felt like a fictionalized version of the school. Other than the aforementioned uniform, almost nothing looked familiar. I did recognize one coach, but that was about it. He was talking about “the principal who had been there 20 years” and it was somebody I’d never heard of. There was Principal Warfield, who was there before I was. He was followed by Principal Snidely, who left my seventh great year to be replaced by Ms McDonald whom I don’t remember as particularly impressive but apparently impressed somebody because she was the Superintendent of the entire district by the time I graduated from college and now has a school named after her. Then Warfield came back shortly after I left when Mossman got promoted en route to fame and fortune. Who was this person they were interviewing?!

I had originally thought that they might have taken some liberties or something, then I realized “Holy crap, I’m old.” As in, someone could have been there for 20 years and would still be “after my time.” Indeed, the only teacher/coach I recognized was new my eighth grade year. I remember him as seeming old at the time, but that probably meant he was 25 or something. (Tangential, but another teacher/coach friended my brother on Facebook and it turned out that he was in his twenties despite my remembering him as old.

My friend Clint and I went back and visited the middle school towards the end of our junior year in college. It was… pretty anti-climactic. I thanked the first teacher I ever had that flunked me, which turned out to be a really good thing and turned my academic career around (I got a lot of just-passing grades in elementary school that I am pretty sure were sympathy grades). We had always planned to do an open house at the elementary school one of those years, but they actually discontinued it at some point and so we couldn’t. And since our schools are bunkers now, you can’t just stop by without people assuming you’re some pedo creep or something.

My elementary school isn’t my elementary school anymore. We were re-routed somewhere else. My high school isn’t my high school for the same reason, and also it doesn’t exist because they demolished and rebuilt it. My middle school, though, remains my middle school. Even if they replaced all of the cast.