Actually, thinking about for a while after writing the post (a while meaning two minutes), it could either make the world a lot better or a whole lot worse (or both). Imagine what life would be like if absolutely everyone was a psychologist? :eek:
It’d be a fun experiment to try.
Ha. Yeah, if only. 
Actually I’m glad I didn’t grow up in Evanston. It reminds me too much of the place I actually did grow up in.
Well, I’m freshly out of high school, so I can’t say much about changing things that would affect me long-term, but…
I wish I had taken my classes a little less seriously. I was often stressed because I felt like I had to do everything perfectly, even in the classes which you could breeze through easily.
I guess I would have socialized more. A lot of the people at my school were complete jerks, but there were certainly some decent people. I was (and am) so…socially anxious, I guess you could say (I’m a wallflower, most definitely), that it took me a long time to make any real friends in high school. I should mention here that I was homeschooled until ninth grade, so I really didn’t know anybody at my high school beforehand.
In fact, I didn’t really get to know the people that became my closest school friends until my senior year. I wish I had gotten to know them sooner.
If I actually had control over the school, I would kick out some of the idiot teachers. My English teachers for ninth, tenth and eleventh grade were morons. They didn’t know the first thing about the language, and I certainly didn’t learn anything from them.
I would eliminate the classes taught by athletic coaches (at least the athletic coaches at my school). There’s a reason they’re coaches and not teachers.
Also regarding athletics, I would stop the ridiculous preference shown toward athletes. In PE my freshman year, the coaches basically let the athletes sleep in class while they yelled at anyone else who wasn’t paying attention. In my senior year one of my classmates tried to choke another guy. The victim actually passed out. Did the attacker get suspended? Nope…because he was the quarterback of our football team (also his dad is rich and on the school board, which probably had something to do with it). I mean, he wasn’t even that good of a quarterback.
I would have begged my senior English teacher to stay after her two years of ACE teaching were up (er, if I had to repeat my senior year or something). Only good English teacher I’ve had.
I would have smacked some fools. Or not.
Instead of just skipping through out my Junior year and hiding out at the library to research things that interested me and to read literature that challenged me, I’d have started doing that Freshman year and had a much happier adolescence.
Hiding out there with my lunch and reading Forester or doing research on Cold Fusion was a great pleasure. As I was doing actual work and was quiet and polite, the librarians believed I had special dispensation to be there all the time and they liked me quite a bit. I was a junior friend of the library and considered getting a degree in library science because of my illicit library time.
Actually, back then I believe the enrollment was about 3500, which is still honkin’ huuuge.
Spoken like a man who once managed to set a Susie-Q on fire in the cafeteria…you know, sometimes I think back and realize it’s a wonder we all made it to adulthood.
Oh, one thing I forgot before - why the hell did they have a student smoking lounge? I’m guessing they don’t anymore.
I would have taken the honors or AP English all four years except only 10th and 12th grades. My regular 11th grade English class had Spelling tests. Spelling!
Physics was a waste for me. Didn’t like Calculus either.
Better Russian instruction during the year my regular Russian teacher was away in Germany. Oh, and a more focused exchange program during the month my senior year I spent in Rostov-on-Don, so that maybe I would actually have learned something.
Better guidance on college admissions, etc.
Actually, I think it was a twinkie. And it was Alicia who got the idea to see what would happen if we lit a ping-pong ball on fire. I gladly arranged this experiment. We thought it would just pop… instead it burst into flame! So I threw the nearest soft object onto it to put out the blaze. I think I got away with only a detention, but we all learned something that day… that twinkies are extremely flammable!
You know, I never thought about that until you mentioned it. Why would a high school provide an area for the kids to do something that the school board is spending tax dollars to prevent them from doing? Since you’re still in Chicagoland, I’m sending you on a mission to see if the smoking lounge is still there.