Making the transition from a Middle School to a High School is pretty intimidating even knowing most of the kids you have gone to school with for the last 8 or 9 years. For those of you who came to this area from somewhere else, how scarey was that first day, whether it was your freshmen, sophomore, junior or senior year?
I came from a junior high school in Montgomery, AL that probably had about 60 classmates in the entire 9th grade class. My first day sophomore year at Woodson left me in shell shock. And we had only 5 minutes between classes??????
Did everyone else who was new to the area have the same feeling?
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I sure remember the Villager craze. I came to WTW in the middle of tenth grade from Germany. A friend who had moved back to the states about six months before informed me that my clothes would not do in the Northern Virginia area. Was she ever right! I felt very out of place because I didn't have the "right" clothes. There were four children in my family and my parents had to buy a house (I think it was $25,000 and had five bedrooms!)so they certainly couldn't afford a new wardrobe for me. I was shy anyway, and the fact that I was not dressed like the other kids at school really made me feel out of place. Now when I think back on it, it makes me angry that I let things so unimportant bother me!
Patti Nielsen Smith
We moved from Ohio to Virginia in January 1963, right in the middle of my eighth-grade year.
Add to that the double whammy that I was a year younger because I had skipped second grade and starting Woodson in the fall of 1963 at age 13 was kind of overwhelming.
First day for me at WTW was as a senior. Spent my junior year in a castle at a SWISS boarding school on Lake Geneva where all of my classes, including english, were in french.
It was amazing how many people would come up to me and say " I've heard you're a foreign exchange student from SWEDEN" And I would politely say that I was an American that just happened to go to SWITZERLAND for a year.
My first impression of WTW was how calm and conservative it seemed compared to Wakefield HS in Arlington, Va. where I went my sophomore year. That was the first year where the exclusively black Hoffman-Boston HS had been closed and integrated into Wakefield. This was a few years before the 'Remember The Titans' movie and book experience at TC Williams in Alexandria. Needless to say,it was an action packed year.
Having attended a different school every year since 5th grade(and my dad was NOT in the military or government) I approached each new school as an adventure. Each adventure was truly wonderful and I was able to meet so many interesting people. Everyone at WTW was especially genuine, kind and friendly.
Woodson was too strange and new for me. I was shy and overwhelmed by the size. I grew up in Annandale and was all set to become an Annadale Atom but my parents moved to Fairfax - the edge of the world at that time. No kidding - Braddock Rd. was a single lane dirt road in some places.
I remember the Villager craze too -I made my own clothes at the time and was really into Mary Quant and the whole British invasion. I took notes during A Hard Days Night. At that time I was planning a career in fashion design. Even when I made Villager type clothes they were a little off due to the fabrics or colors I used.
Elaine Harris
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