Jan Yager:  

oined to mean the way that friendships may change or shift as we go through life and even how we define friendship may change. Back in those days, we did not have e-mail. It was a big deal to try to get together with school friends outside of your block in Bayside. Looking back, I wish I had tried harder to stay connected to my friends from elementary school. I am hoping to reconnect with them now, hopefully through classmates.com. (FRIENDSHIFTS is the title of my book about friendship, an outgrowth of my sociology dissertation. I was interviewed about my book and my friendship research on THE OPRAH WINFREY SHOW, THE TODAY SHOW, THE VIEW, CBS' SUNDAY MORNING, and in newspapers, magazines, and online publications.) My favorite memory of P.S. 31 was the class trip we took to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was a magical day exploring the artifacts from ancient Egypt and taking the chartered bus from Queens to Manhattan. Mrs. Snipes' class was in the library room. She had us enter into a competition whereby for every book you read you would get a completed square on graph paper that she put on the wall. I was so motivate to read that year. I wrote to Mrs. Snipes years later. She was in a nursing home by then. I didn't get to see her again, but I did get to write to her and tell her how meaningful her teaching was for me. Junior High School 74 was only two years because I was in the SP so I 7th through 9th grades were combined into 2 years instead of three. Probably the most memorable time at JHS 74 was when my sister Eileen and I co-wrote the Senior Show, a parody that was very well-received. My junior high school social studies teacher, Mr. Smollar, had a way of turning social studies into an amazing journey. He was one of the most outstanding teachers I ever had. Francis Lewis High School was a huge school with almost 5,000 students. But out of our class of 1965 of more than 1,500 students, there were so many classmates who I got to know and like. My best friend was Judy and we're still very close friends after all these years. I've reconnected with a friend from high school. We weren't close in high school but we're developing a close friendship since we reconnected within the last year or so. I enjoyed my cheerleading buddies and I was feature editor on the high school paper, THE PATRIOT. My sister Eileen was editor-in-chief. I also wrote a lot of stories. My lifelong love of writing was apparent in high school. (I had been on the paper in junior high school as well.)I also wrote a column that I distribute to students entitled "Slightseeing II>" It was about all the free or low-cost things you could do in Manhattan. I gave it out for weekends and during the recess breaks. (My older brother Seth wrote "Slightseeing" for his newspaper at NYU where he was a student. That's why I called my version "Slightseeing II." I was also in the school choir, where I met a lot of other classmates with shared interests.