<Begin Segment 11>

RP: Eventually you went to Menlo Park High School? Where did you go to high school?

KO: The high school I went to was in Redwood City. That was the only, that was essentially the equivalent of a unified school district. The whole part, area around, I guess, around Redwood City county seat, the old, I guess about ten, twelve, ten miles' radius or something around that area had that one high school. And there was another high school I think somewhere in the Palo Alto side of Menlo Park, way down to the bay, bay front area. But that was a small place, and I guess that wasn't, that was a relatively new school, so it wasn't well-established. But when I was going to high school, that whole area was one unified high school district. So we wound up, everybody and their cousins went to that high school. That was pretty good, 'cause at that time, it was a pretty good school.

RP: So did you scheme your way through high school, too?

KO: Oh yeah, yeah. I schemed my way through high school. And I think, was it, we had an equivalent of social studies course, and yeah, I think the social studies course, I wound up not being, not recognized as a troublemaker, but it kept me out trouble, and I usually wound up in the very back row in the classroom. And the reason I wound up in the very back row in the classroom was I used to fall over in my chair. I would lean my chair back, we had tables and chairs, desks, and I would lean my, tend to lean my table, chair back. And every now and then, of course, I'd lean back too far and guess what happens? [Laughs] And normally I would, essentially like in the arithmetic courses, I would know a fair amount of the answers from having schemed my way to figure out the answers. And so they wouldn't call on me too often in a classroom 'cause they needed to get the other kids doing their stuff. So I wound up being relegated to the back of the classroom where I could lean my chair up against the wall and stay out of trouble. And so that worked out in social studies. Other courses were sort of normal, so there wasn't any problem. Technically, you might say, the courses in science and stuff, I did all right. I was interested in that stuff, so I would study that stuff and I didn't have to go through all these shenanigans to get by.

And let's see. There was one other course that I wound up in doing my shenanigans. I'm trying to figure out which course that was. I wound up doing the same sort of thing in a couple of other courses. But this wasn't so much shenanigans, it's simply that... oh, I know. I know what it was, yeah. I liked arithmetic, and obviously, I got pretty well at algebra and stuff. And we had a pretty good teacher in algebra, and it turns out that we only had, there was only about two first or second year algebra classes in high school, and high school wasn't all that big. So they only had several mathematics classes, algebra class. And I wound up in one, the first-year algebra, or first algebra course with a couple of other friends who, like me, were sort of schemers. It turns out that we got into the algebra program and there was about two or three of us in the algebra class out of thirty or something like that that could do these algebra problems in nothing flat. Part of it was we were sort of cooperative, too, but the problem was that we would do the class even if we were separated, we would finish the problem before anybody, most of the other classes would. And of course you couldn't keep kids quiet, so we wound up talking with each other and stuff like that, and of course, disturbing the class. And the teacher would get a little bit annoyed because here we were, we were, he couldn't punish us for not doing our work 'cause we had already done the work. [Laughs] The sample program, the problem that he gave us we had finished, and we had nothing to do so we were twiddling our thumbs and communicating with each other. So the teacher we had got a very brilliant idea. And he was a first year teacher, it was a first year and second year algebra teacher, stuff like that. So he took the three or four of us that kept doing this all the time, and he shoved us off onto one table as a group. And he'd run the class through the regular curricula, you might call it, and give us the problem. We would finish the problem, and here we'd be twiddling our thumbs and the rest of the class still struggling. And when he noticed that we were through with our class, what he would do to us, he would give us a sample problem from the next year's course or the next class and have us try to work the sample problems out. And he was using us as a test, test crew. If we could do the problem, the other class could do it. If we couldn't figure out how to do the problem, he'd have problems with the other class. So we were the, we were the test guinea pigs for that class. And he kept us quiet doing that. We could take those course and probably about, most of the time, we were just barely finished by the time, end of the hour or whatever it was. But we were kept busy doing extra work. And this was just sort of extra puzzles for us, so we were sort of happy, engaged. And the nice thing about it, we would be in a group so we could talk to each other very quietly and cooperate and find out what to do with these things. So this worked out real well. And he did that, we had this teacher two years in a row for algebra, first and second year algebra, something like that. And we had the same bunch of kids, more or less, in those courses. He would work us out on that one. He worked at us, and I think, I think in the second year, we were, he started us out on more advanced algebra and stuff like that, and kept us occupied. By that time, though, we were getting ready to graduate anyway, so it wasn't too bad. But that worked out real well.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2008 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.