:smack: How could I forget that my high school required four years of gym? I didn’t hate this as much as some people did, but it was a complete waste. Even considering that kids don’t get enough exercise. A friend of mine got pissed off senior year and complained to the gym teachers on the first day about it. She said something like “Why is gym the most important class I’m taking? If I miss three days of gym, I fail for the year. It’s easier to fail Gym than Advanced Placement Physics!”
I told my parents that I should not take maths because I was hopeless at it. They made me take it anyway. So I wagged pretty much a years worth of maths classes and got in all sorts of trouble and then obviously failed.
If I had my time back I would yelled at my parents until they had backed down. I still want to find my fifth form maths teacher and say “SEE! I told you I would never need logarithms or their evil cousins”.
Stupid maths. :mad:
That’s Illinois state law, not your high school. I complained about the very same thing – didn’t my high school have a bigger obligation to teach me, say, science instead of water polo?
There used to be an exemption from gym class for varsity athletes during their sports season, on the theory that 2-3 hours of practice a day was getting them more exercise than a 40-minute gym class (and they needed the extra homework time, anyway), but I believe that’s been discontinued.
Eva Luna, Evanston Township High School, Class of ‘86
One class that did me all kinds of good was typing. One semester of typing, and it’s been totally useful ever since.
A friend of mine took a business class in high school, and he uses it yet. He owns a business and is worth a couple of million dollars (that I know of). He dropped out of high school at 17 and joined the Marines (not a lifer, I think he spent 2 years or thereabouts).
I was a placid bookworm and soaked up whatever was there, plus a lot of random reading. There is no doubt it could have been better, ditto worse.
Physical education (4 years required) could have been a lot better. One thing I wish would have been for them to actually educate you about physical things, like how to fall (drama students got that–how to fall without getting hurt), tumbling, or dance (non-social dance).
And, you know, the career counseling. I could have used some stimulus there.
I wish I would have been awake in high school. Intellectually awake. I don’t think that happened until after high school.
Well, I would’ve gone somewhere else with a gentler social climate, maybe Columbine High… :rolleyes:
Anyway…
- I would’ve joined the Quiz Team like they wanted me to. We would’ve been a legend.
- I would’ve become a Black Belt in some kick-ass martial art so that the first time I got threatened by a gang girl Freshman year, I could’ve kicked her mf ass and left her bloodied and unconscious in the hallway for all her homeys to see instead of cowering in the bathroom stall and dealing with their bullshit for the next three years.
- I would’ve not given a rat’s ass what anyone thought of me.
- No boyfriend. That guy I thought was good enough for me back then… ::shudder::
- No drinking. That was a pretty bad idea.
- I would’ve listened to PUNK ROCK.
- I would’ve continued through virtuoso piano training and become a concert pianist.
- Would’ve gotten straight A’s in school.
- NO crying in school.
- I would’ve opted to pay for private Driver’s Ed lessons so that I could graduate at 16 instead of 17. Then I would’ve taken two years off to backpack in Europe or something awesome like that.
- I would’ve become a working artist sooner and tried to bypass college for the art world. I simply wasn’t focused enough.
In short, I would’ve been Super High School Girl instead of the low self-esteem, immature, sad sludge that I was in the reality of high school.
I would have finished.
If it’s okay to change the question slightly, I would change it so that rich parents couldn’t buy their average intellect kid’s way into Ivy League schools by sending them to private prep high schools, while bright kids from the plains states go to four year rural public high schools that are, “Good nuff to keep ya on daddy’s farm.”
Actually I’m from Long Island, New York. You’re correct that it’s the law (probably also the state) instead of my school. Still a huge waste of time.
How about eliminating DARE and the other useless programs that take up so much of the time?
I would have nuked the school on the first day, when I discovered that unlike everyone else in the building, people in my homeroom class were not allowed to choose our ‘option’ class and were instead forced to take music-- with a teacher who makes the guy in the Simpsons look enthusiastic about the arts.
Really, everything just went downhill from there.
It would have been nice to have a geography class. The closest we ever came to geography was World History. And by “world history” I mean Europe and Russia. It would have also been nice to have World History mean world history.
World Lit. was the same as World History. And by World Lit. I mean British Lit.
I would have dumped History and taken the bludge of Social Sciences that most of my friends took. I moved back here as soon as I finished highschool, guess how much use knowing the history of Canada has been?
High school where I went was grades 7-10, then there was an optional secondary college (for University bound students) that did grades 11 and 12. If I had my choice, it’d all have been more like years 11 and 12. No uniform, no bells to tell us when we had to be in class, lots of personal responsibility, essay writing that was expected to be of first year University standard, clear demarcation between which courses were considered advanced and which weren’t.
In grades 7-10, the administration was so intent on not being seen to stream us that we weren’t really given any guidance on which classes were technically meant to be for the university-streamed and which weren’t. All the while being told that the decisions we made about which classes to take in 8th grade would determine the entire course of our future careers.
In grade 11-12 I would have changed the whole huge emphasis on success- in my psych class we were asked what people feared most, and a lot of students answered that they feared not getting high marks in their pretertiary subjects more than they feared death. Additionally, they had no idea of what they would do if they didn’t get the marks they expected. It was success or … some bleak outcome that they couldn’t put into words. Of course that was nothing like the truth of the matter, everyone in that class was going to do well enough to get into University, and even if they hadn’t, repeating grade 12 would not be the end of life as they knew it. I wish that the culture hadn’t put so much ulcer-developing pressure on 16 and 17 year olds.
I already had a hunch then about what I can see clearly in retrospect: If it really matters to you that you graduate near the top of your class, then you’re probably working your ass off to make the positive outcome happen, but for most people, once you do well enough to make it into University, which I did, without doing nearly as well as most of those kids in terms of final grades, then no one cares how you did in high school.
I would have put forth more of an effort in math and science.
Humanities and Social Sciences were always very easy for me and I excelled in them without trying very hard. Math and sciences were…another story and bitter that I couldn’t understand without a lot of work, I basically did the minimum required to earn a C. Out of sixteen semesters of math and science, I got a C in all but four (one D in Algebra, a B in Algebra 2, and Bs both semesters of Marine Biology). Now that I’m an adult, I’m actually very interested in the sciences and I wish I had worked harder so that I could understand it better now.
The only thing I wish that could be changed that wasn’t my own fault is my Spanish 5 class. My Spanish teacher pretty much decided that by then, we could already speak Spanish well enough and pretty much ceased teaching. Instead, we went out to lunch at Mexican restaurants and tutored elementary students in Spanish. Seemed fun at the time, but not all that educational. I don’t think anyone even took the AP test. Meanwhile, the French 5 students spent the whole year cramming for both French AP tests.
I would have made the curriculum much more demanding, challenging, and consistent. As much as back then I would have rebelled against the idea, I would have created a much more difficult course load and gotten much more deeply into every subject. I’d like there to be much more writing, more scientific exploration, more musical opportunity, and a whole lot more homework.
Om, where to begin? I went to Catholic school for eight years, so I’d like all that time in Religion class back. Well, most of it. I’d like to not have been told I would never be as good as my older brother. I would have liked not to have been an outcast. Also, I don’t hate the idea of uniforms, but I hate unmatchable polyester that doesn’t fit anyone. What, 16 year old girls have hips? Clearly not. Then I would like to personally smash every copy of that evil schedulaling software that my school used and then hunt to down the programmers and have them explain to me how I couldn’t have a senior year in high school. But I digress.
I took six AP classes in my sophomore and junior years and don’t think I was the worse for wear. I started college shortly after my 17th birthday, without the benefit of a diploma and will graduate, summa cum laude, before my 20th. I don’t feel that it’s done me any harm. Although I do wish I could have worn that hideous green robe and walked with some class, any class.
As to cooking and balancing checkbooks, I learned those at my father’s knee. I’ve been doing the accounting for his business since I was 13 or 14, without much of a problem. It really isn’t that hard. And cooking, well ask my wok. I moved out of my parents and was beside myself without having one, and I’m about as Asian as the pope.
Silly me - I looked at the location, thought of all my H.S. buddies who ended up at Northwestern U. because their parents taught there, so they got nearly free tuition, and made an unwarranted assumption.
One thing I would change about my school is to cut it up! Our school was huge… it was a half mile long! I think it had 10,000 students when I was there in early 80s (help, Mz. Luna). There’s no way you can control a student body that size. When I was actually a student, this was probably a good thing, but 20 years later…
I’d also add more psychology. Everyone should know some psychology. It would make the world a better place ( or would it?).
Do you think it would make the world a better place?