It is hard to imagine that I graduated from Mount Greylock Regional High School in Williamstown, MA, thirty years ago this June. Mount Greylock is a great school in a great town, but I rarely reflect back on my experiences there.

One experience, however, has come to mind twice this week for different reasons. It is one of the most memorable experiences I had, one which taught me so much more than many other hours in the classroom.

The year was 1972. America was mired down in an unpopular war abroad. Many people considered the man sitting in the White House a crook. In many ways, it was a year not much different than today.

Back then, there was a draft, and people found different ways to avoid the draft. I had a bunch of longhaired teachers, whom everyone said had become teachers to avoid the draft. Williamstown was a fairly liberal town, so they got away with things they might not have in other towns.

Miranda is now in eighth grade and is reading Lord of the Flies for school. I remember the day that my eighth grade teacher passed out copies of Lord of the Flies to our class. He said he had an important lesson for us and asked us to turn to page 123. I don’t remember the page exactly, but it seemed like a strange place to get introduced to the book we would be reading. About a third of the way down, there was a phrase that had been crossed out by a black magic marker.

“This is called censorship”, the teacher explained. He spoke about how people had complained about the language in the book and gotten the school to cross out the phrase. Visions of teachers, in the teachers lounge, crossing the phrase out in book after book and muttering about the idiocy of the school administration came to mind.