I was sitting at a little desk in a high school classroom, and on the walls hung posters of Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Ernest Hemingway, guys like that. So it seemed as if I was back in school in the late 1960s, but I had never been in the room before. So then it started to feel like that dream where I’ve forgotten to attend one of my classes for weeks.

But no, I could tell by the hum of the fluorescent lights that it was just reality. (I delete background noise from my dreams to save bandwidth.)

What it was, was Ames High School. Another stop on our annual winter tour of Iowa’s educational facilities as our kids go to basketball and volleyball tournaments and speech contests.

Some of the events are hosted by little schools still dreaming of that big bond issue in the sky. They have charming, old-fashioned gymnasiums with a raised stage at one end, and the lunch tables go wherever there’s enough room to use forks with an acceptable level of casualties.

Then there are the schools in towns that are determined to be among the state’s survivors. Schools that have spent money, a lot of it, and not that long ago.

We spent one day in the newest addition to Grinnell High School, which contains an aircraft hangar of a gymnasium and an auditorium that would suit Broadway just fine.

You can tell by the way they handled the details – the design of the logo, the padded, mascot-emblazoned chairs for the coaches and players, the elaborate metalwork behind the scoreboard – that they set out to make an impression. You can find out how they managed to pay for it by reading the list of donors on the wall. Two benefactors gave at least $1 million apiece, and several others kicked in substantial amounts too.

Then we spent a Saturday at Linn-Mar High School in Marion, a huge place with about 1,700 students in grades 9-12. They’re probably not skimping on sports equipment, because the gym walls hold enough state championship banners to cover up all the mistakes you ever made, with enough left over for a nice quilt.

The trophy case masses enough hardware in one spot to warp the space-time continuum. Which might explain the way our volleyball team was playing.

It should be noted that these schools are putting their efforts into more than just athletics. Grinnell and Linn-Mar both post excellent academic results, and Linn-Mar ranks among the nation’s top 40 high schools for music performance and education.

Ames High aims high, too, but what stuck in my mind were those ’60s heroes, popping up in one classroom after another.

Maybe it’s a college-town thing. Maybe the public school teachers in a place like Ames are similar to the college faculty there – people who became intensely connected to the culture of their college years and couldn’t bear to leave it all behind.

Plus, teenagers still listen to the Beatles, which seems chronologically wrong. That would be like Baby Boomers buying Tommy Dorsey records, which we didn’t.

But the posters weren’t the only things that seemed eerily familiar. We heard a high school girl present her speech on the need for adults to get involved politically. I know you’re busy, she said, but come on; you’ve got to do better than this.

It was all the idealism and self-assurance one could wish for in a teenager.

You can spend all you want on high-tech scoreboards, but some things never change.