Best school?

I'm a graduate of Great Neck North, on Great Neck, Long Island, New York. According to the listing in Newsweek, it's the #23 top school in the U. S. A. Of course, as any of my fellow alumni would confirm, the most important thing is that it's ranked higher than Great Neck South, which is only #31. Actually it's the top ranking Long Island high school, which is good for my parents' home's property value.

Honestly, I must admit that I did not enjoy my studies there. We moved from Bayside, NY the summer before the 8th grade. Actually, I was supposed to enter the 9th grade, second year of the "Two Year S.P.," "Special Progress" was the official name, I think. It was a two year program to complete the three years of junior high school. Great Neck didn't recognize it, leaving me back and not even assigning me to any "advanced" classes. To put it mildly, I was bored out of my mind, since the first year of the Two Year SP included two-thirds of the 8th grade curriculum. I got off track and lost the art of studying. Yes, it still hurts all these decades later, and as an educator, I think it was a big mistake not to challenge me.

Great Neck was also very elitist and competitive, in addition to the upper-class snobbiness. There were various "crowds" according to religion and color, which was strange for me, since my Bayside neighborhood and childhood in Bell Park Gardens was so different. BPG was a new post-WWII housing development populated exclusively by young struggling families, mostly Jewish, just like us.

Suddenly I was thrust into a very different world, for which I wasn't prepared. Of course, those were the sorts of challenges and difficulties which made me the person I am today, for better or for worse.

Among my classmates were people who turned out quite differently, such as, Andy Kaufman and Jon Avnet (though the birth year seems wrong). Yes, we were a large, strange and diverse class. As far as I know, even though a couple hundred were also Jewish, I'm the only one living in Israel, making me one of the strangest of all.