I found my groove in university not high school. In fact one might say I’m finding my groove right now. I didn’t really like High school all that much, but it was bearable and I had some good times. It doesn’t matter where you are at the time, but at as you go through life you are always put under societal pressures. When your in High School it’s important to find a date for the prom, when your thirty you should be married with a house. I’m sure looking back when I’m 60 I’ll laugh at the pressures that were put on me right now as a 26 year old.
Is it possible that at 16 years old, you didn’t know everything?
I’m sorry, but for 90% of high school kids, I’ve seen very little to indicate to me that they should be considered an “adult” according to any commonly accepted definition of the term. I would say that about a lot of college-age people as well.
Not only possible, but absolutely certain. Nobody knows everything. That’s still no reason to treat everyone like helpless idiots.
And a lot of people in their 20s, 30s, and so on, until death. There is always a portion of the population that is extremely stupid, misguided, uninformed and dangerous.
But if the goal is to teach, to guide young minds into responsible adulthood, it is absolutely unconscionable to treat them like infants in a daycare. Like retarded, cracked-out, gangster infants potentially armed with bombs. High schoolers aren’t alien monsters, they’re people. Let them make their own decisions and make their own mistakes. It’s the only way to learn how to make decisions and avoid mistakes.
I’d have to agree. We know for instance that the impulse control centers for the brain are not yet fully developed until the very late teens to mid-twenties, depending on gender and the individual ( females do indeed seem to mature earlier ). 14-18 year-olds aren’t biological adults - they may be able to reproduce, but for physiological reasons they aren’t yet entirely sane ;).
Which is another potential data point to add to the other good answers above. It’s the period ( for most ) of your body’s greatest biological upheavals. Puberty and all its attendant woes, especially the maelstrom of hormonal change, seem guaranteed to make most experiences seem sharper and more vivid both in the now and in memory.
I’m pretty indifferent to High School. I showed up at 7a.m and left at 3:30 but otherwise I never stayed for any extra activities.
I had friends there but none of them I hung out with outside of school.
Since I worked various jobs since I was 14 most of my social interaction and finding out who I was occured at these jobs. People of various backgrounds and ages all working together felt more like real life to me than being with a bunch of kids like myself.
I’m one who found high school constricting and repressive and I couldn’t wait to get out. The summer between my junior and senior years, I got a scholarship to attend college summer school in a town three hours away. That was one of the best summers of my life and I got college credit for it. However, all that freedom magnified my attitude problem exponentially. It felt a lot like being babysat after a brief college experience.
So imagine my dismay when my French teacher announced that for me, high school was nearly over and so were the best years of my life. IIRC, I burst into tears thinking, Really? It doesn’t actually get any better than this? I wandered over to the journalism room where I was working on my newspaper layout for the upcoming edition. The J teacher wanted to know why I was all sniffly. I told her about the French teacher’s gloom-and-doom prediction. J-teacher said, “Oh, don’t listen to her; she’s a bitter old hag. I promise you that life does get better after high school. A lot better. Trust me. You’ll get through this and forget all about it.”
She was right. 
It’s not really that important. But at that age, people tend to be more insecure as compared to adult life (most of us probably carry at least some degree of insecurity with us to the grave). So social pressures and “fitting in” become especially important, even if you’re one of the loner/reject/rebel types like I was, it’s still something that weighs on the mind.
Also it’s a coerced shared experience that encompasses a large part of your life (if you live to be 80 years old, high school constituted 5% of your entire life), so you are going to feel you have at least some basic connection with the people you went to school with.
They’re very important formative years, with people you may have been together with for 13 years. The other students are generally people from your home area, all the same general age, and some/many will be kids you went to elementary school with.
When you start high school, you’re a kid, being driven around by your parents, and probably not dating or having much sex. When you graduate, you’re likely dating and driving and ready for adult life. You go through these changes along with all the others your age.
Yeah, but a lot of them do act like cracked-out retards. I mean it’s like a job (one of the hallmarks of being an adult). You are supposed to be at a certain place (your class) at a certain time. You are supposed to do your work. You are also supposed to keep your mouth shut while in class. A lot of students in high school can’t even manage that. Their concept of “I’m an adult and can do what I please” generally consists of staying up late partying with their friends and maybe working some menial job for pocket money while crashing at their parents house.
One of the biggest frustration of teenagers is that they are at an age where they do want to exercise more control over their lives. But they aren’t at a point yet where they can make the proper decisions. Nor are they really able to manage the consequences if they do make the wrong decisions - like getting arrested for drug use, or getting drunk and crashing their car, or knocking up their girlfriend.
A miserable time of personal violence & social deprivation, that I have not gotten over.
Please, give an example of a lack of freedom you had that was a direct result of your attending high school. Maybe we can help explain to you why NOT having certain “freedoms” at that age is really a good idea. And please tell us how old you are now.
My personal experience with high school was very positive for the most part. I was a good student, I was active in lots of different musical groups and clubs, I had good friends who were as geeky as me and some who numbered among the super-cool-kids. I look back at high school with fondness, because for the most part it was the last time in my life that I had the freedom to use my talents, enjoy my hobbies, earn some money for college, learn all sorts of new things, meet all sorts of people, at no cost to myself, no pressure to earn enough to support myself, no worries or stresses that outlasted college. I got to learn most of the skills I would need to get through college and college life, and I made friendships that have lasted for 40 years, and more.
I have no desire to place cameras on every street corner, and I hate taking off my shoes at the airport.
I regret that my children did not have as positive an experience with high school as I did, but that was mostly because they insisted on having the “freedom” to stay out to all hours, drink, smoke, attend raves, take drugs and generally blow off their school work. One dropped out, one failed to earn enough credits to graduate. Neither has attained any great success in their lives, and both still struggle to overcome the results of the choices they made in high school.
While college was a chance to step away from the roles and expectations that high school had placed on me, I could not have made those changes without the experiences I’d had as an teen. The good parts of high school far outweighed the bad, and even the bad helped me learn. It was a safe haven before entering a world that can be far harder than you think.
Was it the most important part of forming the Me I am today? No, but it was an important part. And looking back on it helps you to put other things in perspective. When you think of how overwrought you may have gotten over some event in high school, and you can look at your current self and be proud of how you’ve grown and matured since then.
And reunions are great. I was not Miss Popularity in high school, but I still enjoy reconnecting with people who knew me before, who shared those commom experiences, and who have done interesting things since then. They are part of the Community that raised me, and I like seeing them again.
Is anyone really happy in high school? I doubt it. Teenage years are tough years and most teens go through spells of depression and self-doubt.
I graduated from high school in 1961. While I did well at school, I hated most of it. I never felt like I fit in when I was being myself, so I manufactured a persona that did the job. Eventually I grew up.
I’m still close friends with a half dozen women I went through high school with. Since I live more or less where I’ve always lived, and so do they, it has been easier to maintain the friendships. But the “importance” of the high school years has faded, and been replaced by the experiences of marriage and motherhood and tragedy. We are much alike, we are obviously the same age, the same “class”, the same ethic group. But we are also staggeringly different in the most amazing ways and that’s what makes the friendships so valuable, I think.
We seldom talk about the high school years. Those years are just the jumping off point.
I couldn’t wear hats or chew gum. I had to wear a visible ID necklace around my neck at all times. There was a dress code. Headphones were prohibited.
I wasn’t allowed to walk across the street to eat at McDonald’s (the one that I worked at almost full time) or Subway instead of the crap we were served in the cafeteria.
We weren’t allowed to walk in groups of more than five.
The thermostat was consistently set on a chilly 52 degrees, to keep the students awake and prevent girls from dressing for summer weather.
The few like me who weren’t interested in the mob hysteria that was the “Pep Rally” were viewed as troublemakers and forced to sit silently in the cafeteria under teacher observation.
My lack of religion was looked down upon; and I was most certainly not to discuss my ideas on religion on the school lawn before school, even though the Christians had a prayer/witnessing session there every morning.
Bright colors were gang related and verboten. As were gold teeth and picks-in-Afros.
One year I got a long black expensive trench coat for Christmas and when I wore it to class was promptly told by the principal that it was banned from school property, because it was possible I could hide a shotgun in it and shoot my classmates.
Surprisingly, I was allowed to wear a dress to school, but the principal had to call my mother and ask if I was all right.
That’s just the beginning, and it doesn’t even touch the quality of education. I’ll be 27 in July.
52 degrees?
Apparently skanks start wearing miniskirts at 53 degrees.
I had to actually go to the pep rally. The first one I went to was really boring, since I could not possibly have cared one bit less about any of our school sports teams. Starting in tenth grade, I learned to carry a book in my purse for it (we didn’t have cell phones, and handheld video games were in their infancy). I remember reading a book on quantum mechanics at one pep rally.
When I graduated, I said that the only circumstances under which I’d go to a high school reunion was if I had just traveled to a distant star system at a high percentage of the speed of light and was therefore younger than everyone else. That hasn’t happened, so I haven’t been to any high school reunions.
I’m waiting until the time when being the age I am is worse than being in high school. So far, at 34, it hasn’t happened yet. It’s so nice to be able to go to a comfortable, quiet place to read my books on various geekery, rather than having to sit through a noisy and pointless pep rally. Supporting myself beats the pants off living with my parents. Of course, there’s a bit of bias- there was no SDMB then, maybe high school would have been more tolerable if there had been.
I remember having to go to several too. It would have been a total bore if not for certain cheerleaders.
I’d say there’s also a lot of nostalgia about that time frame because it was a time when you are just starting to get some serious independence. You don’t have to ask mommy or daddy to drive you to the mall, you just get in the car and drive yourself without and the only permission you need is to use the car.
At the same time you never had to really worry about all the responsibilities of adulthood. No worries about paying rent and your parents still bought you the groceries etc.
And it was a period of huge optimism about the future. I can guarantee everyone I went to school with had grand ideas about where they would be right now. A lot of my friends were planning to become doctors and lawyers and one guy was aiming for a master’s degree in fine arts to be a film director.
Nowadays the Actor has become a teacher. The Artist has become a veterinarian. The super-brain who everyone had pegged as the Doctor got a summer job as a roofer just kept doing it, dropping out of university.
But back in highschool we were going to be kings! Nothing as ordinary as working behind a desk, for a non-profit organization, no! We were going to save/rule the world as rock stars and millionaires! Meanwhile, at the time we could reap both the rewards of being wards of our parents while still being quasi-independent. It was a great formative and optimistic time.
Some people really want to recapture the feeling from back in the day.
Well, whatever temperature, it was COLD. The AC never turned off in the hot months, and the heater rarely kicked on in the winter. It was necessary to wear a jacket year round. I think the teachers had some control – some rooms were slightly warmer than others – but it was always cold.
They’re wearing them here already - it’s still below zero. Celcius.