| Writing yesterday about AP tests and classes in high school led me to thinking about my high school experience. I don't think a lot about high school, It's been 5 years (!) since I graduated and I only keep in touch with a handful of people I know from that time. I hated high school.
I went to the same private school for elementary and middle school. It was a small but very good school with only about 25 kids in each grade and very individualized learning. Each year we were all split up into at least three groups for things like reading and math, and I never felt forced to work below my level. I took Algebra in 7th grade because hey, I knew how to do the math. Especially once we got into middle school, we were offered a lot of freedom. There were no bells for classes, you knew that you had 5 minutes to do what you needed to do and were expected to show up at your next class on time. And you know what? People followed by the rules. During lunch we were allowed to play in the gym or go outside (but not leave the campus), and due to a 6 day schedule we could take art AND choir AND band AND TWO languages.
My parents decided to switch me from this school to a Catholic high school with 1,300 students when the time came. I'm still not entirely sure what their reasoning was, I think they believed my original school was too small and I needed to be exposed to more people and a larger variety of classes before I went to college. I spent the first two years there being absolutely miserable. I only knew 2 people out of 350 in my freshman class; both boys, one of whom was borderline learning disabled. Everyone else coming into the school arrived with their classmates from the feeder Catholic elementary schools or with a large group of people they had attended the public middle schools with. They didn't all know each other, but they basically all arrived with a group of friends.
In addition to not knowing all those kids in their preformed cliques, I was placed into french and math classes with juniors and a biology class with sophomores. This meant I was only spending half the day with kids in my own grade which gave me even less of a chance to make friends. I spent two years dreading getting out of bed in the morning and I had very little that resembled a social life.
Now, had I been a different person, it might have been a little easier. I'm not a social butterfly today and at the time I was rather shy. But I had been friends with just about all the kids in my grade in middle school, plus half the kids in the grades above and below me. In terms of that school, I was one of the popular kids, and it was a great shock to my system to suddenly become invisible. One might wonder why I didn't just hang out with the kids I was friends with at my old school, but circumstances conspired against it. Having kids leave for larger high schools was kind of a rite of passage for that school, and less than half of my original class remained at the start of freshman year. Being an excellent private school, kids had come from perhaps a 50 mile radius to attend. Many of them returned to their local public high school, one good friend's family moved to Atlanta, and my closest friend left for boarding school in, funnily enough, the St. Louis area. Had I remained at my original school no doubt I would have become friends with those new kids, but I was suddenly an outsider there.
Perhaps even more than not having friends, I hated the atmosphere of that school. We had uniforms, and I still resent the fact that girls had to wear skirts year-round, even when it was -5 degrees outside in January. Demerits and/or detentions were issued for many violations such as: having your shirt untucked, being just a moment outside the door when the bell rang, speaking quietly to someone in study hall, or not having white socks for gym class. I hated being treated like we were all a bunch of little delinquents who had to be kept firmly in check. I once received demerits and detention for needing to use the bathroom between classes, having to wait for a stall, and being 5 seconds late into the classroom. The passing period was only 6 minutes despite the fact that the furthest classrooms were almost half a mile from the gym. We were not allowed outside under any circumstances between the first bell and the end of the day. I had played volleyball and soccer in middle school, but was no longer allowed to participate in either sport because my mother didn't want to deal with the practice schedule and number of games required for the competitive division that the largest schools played in. I hated the inflexibility of our schedules, we had the same classes at the same times every day, and you could only choose two electives. Depending on the year, science was seen as an elective. We had to take religion classes. Half of freshman year English class was a mythology unit, which I had already covered in far more depth in 6th grade. The biology and chemistry teachers were ridiculously bad. Again, I repeat, science was an elective. The only year I paid attention in English class was AP English senior year, the other years I spent my time reading the 3/4 of the textbook that we didn't cover in class or reading other books on my lap. Come to think of it, reading other books was how I spent most of a year in chemistry, too. At that school, everything was this giant high school cliche. The big social events were basketball and football games and the 'mixers' afterwards. The football players hooked up with the cheerleaders. Looking back it makes me throw up a little. At my old school, there was no football team or cheerleaders. And dammit, I LIKED it that way.
That paragraph of whining is ridiculously long, but i REALLY hated it there. I never rebelled or anything, I was a very well behaved kid who cooperated with the system, but it didn't mean I wasn't miserable. I did make friends junior and senior year, and I got pretty good grades and took all those AP tests and got a scholarship to a pretty good university, but still. I occasionally have nightmares where I have to go back to high school. Perhaps my complaints aren't that bad, considering that some kids are bullied, beaten up, neglected by teachers, etc., but oh, what a soul-sucking prison it really was. If I had to go to that high school, what I learned could have easily been taken care of in two years - 3 years of history, 4 years of science, 2 years of french, 4 years of math fits neatly into two years of 7 classes a day - and then spent some time in community college. If I had the chance to do it again, I would have gone to my original school. They offered a better variety of better classes, and if it meant I ended up with a small group of friends - well, my eventual group of friends was no larger than 25 anyway. Making friends in college would have been no harder since everyone is new, and I would have been better prepared academically.
It doesn't really matter, though, because I can't take it back, and even if I could I wouldn't really, because I met D. through my best friend from (the big, awful) high school. I'll just consider him my reward for putting up with those four years of misery. |
