Northside Offered "Write Your Pants Off." Students Chose by Friend.

I would have taken Write Your Pants Off. I would have been asked, by week three, to transfer to Knit Wit.

Choosing was a countdown. Seniors picked first. Then juniors. Then sophomores. Then freshmen, some of whom, the paper reported, ended up with what many considered the "worst" colloquiums, and some with no colloquium at all, at which point they were randomly assigned to whatever was left. One student's verdict: "at least this way everyone has a colloquium, which is better than nothing."

A year later the paper explained what students were really choosing. Colloquium was the only class Northside students programmed for themselves, and for most it was the only class they could have with their best friend, boyfriend or girlfriend. One student put it plainly: he chose his because a lot of his friends wanted that one, "and it's the only class that I can choose what people I want to be around, so why not?"

The only class you pick yourself, and the subject is the least important thing about it. I chose my college this way. I chose my first apartment this way. I married into a family whose holiday plans I was told about in the car.

Then the administration got involved. In 2007 Northside began automatically placing upperclassmen who had not met the consumer education requirement into the consumer education colloquium, half of them in the fall and half in the spring. Some students who had already met it through AP Microeconomics were placed anyway, and by the time that was sorted out, their first choices were full.

So the one class you choose for your friends became, for a semester, the one class chosen for you by a requirement. Consumer education. You go in wanting to sit next to your best friend and come out knowing how a mortgage works, which is the wrong order to learn those things in.

The middle one is choosing a summer camp. He has narrowed it to two: robotics or sailing. I asked which he's leaning toward. He said he would tell me once he heard back from his friend. I have offered him consumer education. He has declined, on the grounds that I can't pick who's in it.