In 8th grade or even sooner, some parents hired private tutors to rehearse their kids into exam taking. There was some exam at the end of the 8th grade and you got a diploma for it. The more important exam however, and the one where the stake was much higher, was the one for admission to the highschool of your choice. Sometimes, the tutors were the highschool teachers that you would have as your examiners. It did not hurt if they already knew you and you had already paid them a pretty sum for them to tutor you.
When you applied to the highschool, the grades that you had had previously did not count. They were not taken into account or made part of the grade to admit you. Because I was a very good student, my parents did not want to hire any tutor. And it might have turned out to be a big mistake. I almost failed to get a good enough grade to get in. The exams were both written and oral. From these, a final grade was computed and the scores were tabulated. Students were then ranked from the highest grade to the lowest. And if the school had a certain number of available seats for incoming 9th graders, that’s exactly how many would be admitted, starting with the highest score. It was quite expected that there would be 5-6 competitors for the same seat. Especially for the more prestigious schools like this one was. In the end, I managed to get in through a supplementation of seats. We knew that if the child of a high-ranking communist official did not make the grade but wanted to get it, some kind of supplementation would take place and along with the child of the communist official, others, like me would get in.
If you failed, you had to keep trying, or switch to other less prestigious highschools or apply for a trade school. But you needed to go to school for 12 years.
Once I was in, I proved myself again. I did better and better in the four years of high school. The last year (the 12th grade), I had straight 10’s. I was on the principal’s honor roll (my picture was in the teachers’ area along with pictures of the best students.
At the beginning of 9th grade, we had our “Ducklings’ Ball”. We were the Ducklings, the freshmen. A Miss Duckling was chosen. The ball was held in the halls of the highschool. I went to see just how it was, but left quickly because I was incredibly shy and didn’t want to dance. One of the famous traditional dances was “Perinita”. It was danced in a circle with everybody participating. A person (girl or boy) would start the dance. He/She would be inside the circle and holding a kerchief would look around at the people dancing around him/her. Then he/she would pick someone of the opposite sex by draping the kerchief around her/his neck. The person thus chosen would have to accompany the person that chose to the center of the circle. They would both kneel and then kiss. Then the first person would join in the circle and the other person would be the next person to choose somebody of the opposite sex to bring to the center and kiss. That was definitely not for me.
This was the first school social event. There were no other balls or proms prior to that. Actually, after the Ducklings Ball, there was one other ball, when you graduated.
In 9th grade, you decided whether you wanted to go to the humanistic arts (“human” branch) or Sciences (“real” branch). That’s what they would be called in Romanian: uman or real. I did not like math and the math teacher I had in the 9th grade made my mind up. He almost flunked me in math. I barely made a 5 in one of the trimesters. This completely soured me on the “real” side.
So, starting in 10th grade, the classes would be taken apart and re-assembled into Human and Real. Some of the colleagues that I had in the 9th grade went to the Real side; I went to the Human. But then, from the 10th to the 12th, we stayed together in the same group. The grades were also differentiated by a letter. For instance, there was Grade 10 A, 10 B, 10 C, up to H. When we graduated from highschool, there were about 200 of us.
At the start of highschool, we were required to pick a second language to study. The choice for us was between French, German and Russian. And I picked German, which I studied for 4 years all throughout highschool. But, I forgot 99Î of it. When we had German class, we had to go to another classroom where we would meet part of the “D” class (the kids who had picked German). I was in the “C” class. Then we would go back to our regular classroom for all other courses. Of course, we still continued with lessons in our first foreign language, the one that we started in 5th grade. For me, this was English.
(to be continued)
Simona Georgescu
