It would depend when I got dropped into my body. Classes wouldn’t be difficult but I don’t remember where my locker was beyond generalities of each year let alone the combination. If still remember most of the science and math and English was just making crap up about books I didn’t read so that would be easy. I still suck a Spanish but maybe I’ll pick it up the third time.
It’s the extracurricular stuff that would be fun. I’d get to hang out with my buddies again (even though I’m related to one know and seeing three others this weekend) and I know a lot more about football and track after college plus I’d have a much better work ethic in the weight room and on the track.
All in all I’d probably be able to get a full ride to UC Davis instead of the partial they offered me. After that my future knowledge would be worthless since me going to a different college effected multiple marriages of my friends and family including my own. I’d probably try and double major in again engineering and oenology since that was my interest then and now I’m starting my second career in a related field and love every second at work. So aside from sports and education I’d have no idea where I was heading next.
I don’t know what I would do. That was toward the end of living with my abusive father and the beginning of a lifetime struggle with depression, anxiety, PTSD and all that fall out from that.
There weren’t effective treatments then (and often not now) and going back into another lifetime may be too much. The drugs which help now weren’t invented then.
Getting my class schedule is easy. I just go to the school councilor and tell her I need a new copy for my parents or something. My personality being different is no big deal–i had a bunch of changes along the way. Since I have my old brain, I won’t have any trouble relearning anything I forgot.
The main thing would be that I’d try a lot more risky social behaviors since I know how little it actually will matter now. And because I’ll be bored without as much go do online.
I also might join the SDMB and have some fun with knowing things I shouldn’t.
Anything involving making money would be low key so as to not change things too much. I unfortunately don’t see how I can change 9/11 or anything like that. I don’t have that direct level of influence.
Teenagers change all the time, personality changes are easy to explain. Getting your class schedule is easy. “I just don’t know what’s going on with me, I’m having trouble remembering what my classes are, sorry, haven’t been feeling well lately.”
I’d just enjoy the second chance. Take my job money, put half of it in companies like Microsoft and Intel, make better decisions, that sort of thing.
I had enough money saved to be able to buy 200 or so shares of Microsoft stock and I finished high school at exactly the right time to buy it. By 1999 those 200 shares would be worth over $2,000,000. So I just had to survive until then.
How to survive high school? I would know that all I had to do was get good enough grades to graduate. That would be easy, even with my current knowledge. I wouldn’t go to college. I would instead go to the company I work for now, talk to the head of engineering, and tell him so much about how products like theirs work that he would think that I’m a genius. I would have a great job right out of high school. You could do that back then. Some of the smartest people I’ve worked with only had high school diplomas.
And fair warning to the girls I knew back then. I will no longer be the shy boy who rejected your advances. I’ll still be a nice guy, but I am going to town on all y’all.
I know my lock numbers (7-43-36 and 9-41-36 and I discovered that 8-42-36, dialed carefully, would open either one–the second was the gym locker), but I haven’t the foggiest idea where either one was. I could probably recall all the classes I took, but not the timetables or the locations.
But assuming it happened during my freshman year (1950-51), I would save up all the money I could and bet on the Giants to win the pennant. But the major coup would that in 1964 I would buy all the Berkshire-Hathaway stock I possibly could just before Warren bought it at $18. Meantime, eking out a living betting on sporting events, elections and the like.
In HS, I would go through the motions. The math and science courses were undemanding then and would be more so today. I am a much better writer than I was then so I might get As in English. I would absolutely kill the French course, not that my French is so good even now, but I was terrible then. And I would definitely try to become friends with James DePriest.
Samir. Samir, you’re missing the point. The point of the exercise is that you’re supposed to figure out what you would want to do . . . PC load letter?!! What the fuck does that mean?!!
Not remembering stuff is no big deal, I’d pretend to pass out and complain about being fuzzy headed, go to a doctor who’d find nothing wrong, and use that as an excuse for needing to get my schedule printed out and not being familiar with where we are in class. In a week or two I’d be back on track with all of that sort of thing, and this would just be a minor medical incident that no one worries about. I’m much better at doing work, organizing a schedule, and keeping track of life than I was back then.
High school was awful for me because I had awful social skills and significant depression and anxiety, combined with the usual teenager feeling that this current year is Really Important. Now I’d be coming in knowing how to socialize, knowing how to deal with my issues, and knowing that anything that happens is just some temporary high school nonsense, and I’ve got an extra 25 or so years of life. I might try to graduate early, or I might focus on a plan to get into a really good school program, the level of work I’d need to do is less than dealing with a real job. I’d get to do a lot more interesting stuff because I’d take advantage of things I wasn’t interested in then. Don’t know if I’d find it squicky to chase high school girls, if it was then I’d chase college girls - either of which is much easier to do when you are confident and know that there’s no real consequence to getting turned down, and lack a feeling that “I have to get a girl by X year or I’m a failure”.
I’d try to hit the jackpot with great stock buys or bets on games, but honestly I suspect the butterfly effect would ruin most of the easy wins, so I wouldn’t count on it. I’m not going to worry about it too much anyway, I can probably get set up to retire by 45 if I just coast through high school, get tech jobs (which I did a year and a half after high school anyway), and make normal investments. I would not try to convince people that I had future knowledge, I can’t see any gain from doing that. Basically, I’d put up with a lot of annoyance like parental curfews and school rules for a few years knowing that it doesn’t matter, then set out in life with an 18-year-old body but an extra two decades of learning social skills, coping skills, and work skills.
This was also a tv series: Do Over. The exact premise - guy wakes up in his 1980s high school self, tries to turn his life around. I only saw one ep, I think - he won some money as a prize and told his dad to put it all into a new company called Microsoft. After he leaves, his mom says “What’s that all about?” Dad: “Who cares? He’s just a kid, I’ll buy him some savings bonds with it.”
Pretty common fantasy. I’ve never gotten the fixation in US culture with high school being the point where you become who you’ll be for life.
Psychotic break, hell, you could get away with any number of much less severe medical problems to catch up to speed.
Honestly, how hard would high school be for most of us now? Easy as pie. Once I looked at my schedule and my books I’d be back in the saddle in no time.
I’d still be afraid of the butterfly effect, so even under the conditions of the OP, I think I’d at least, for awhile, try to keep my improvements pretty local:
Take better care of myself and start better eating habits so I don’t gain a lot of weight in my 20s I end up having to lose in my 30s and 40s.
Geez, a LOT of girls like me and I was too scared to do anything. I’ll fix that.
I did pretty well in high school, but I could do better and it’d help a lot to take Calculus.
I’d go to a different university.
At 16 years old, which I arbitrarily chose as the point I’m going back (1987) I cannot bet on sporting events and I don’t know why anyone would believe me when I said “Bet as much as you can on the Dodgers to win the 1988 World Series!” So I’d have to bide my time until I could legally gamble, and then I’d start laying bets. But I’d be damn cautious… any deviation from how I know sports history went (which in baseball means pretty much everything) and I have to assume that’s going in a different direction.
Certainly, though, just by handling my finances better and avoiding credit card debt I’d end up insanely rich just through the initial sports betting and playing the markets on both the upslope and downslope of the tech bubble and real estate crisis.
Now here’s the tough one… do I still meet my ex wife? Pro: I don’t meet my ex wife. Con: I don’t have my Small One. Whoa…
I’ll decide later if something needs to be done about Donald Trump.
Find Theo Epstein…become his best friend. Soon prove your acumen at draft picks.
“No no…this Mike Trout kid is the one!”
Of course around 2015 my abilities dried up for some reason.
Edit: but I’d probably get myself fired telling him to pull Pedro in 2003. Him saying he can’t step over Grady like that and who the fuck do I think I am as a player analyst telling him to make onfield decisions .
I actually sort of did time travel back to my high school. When I was about 35, my spouse’s company rented the swimming pool and plaza for a picnic day. (The pool was built long after I left, as a donation, and was built to be a rentable facility to help raise maintenance funds.)
Pushing my 2yo daughter around the old campus was amusing. Doing it with a beer in hand was a truly precious memory.
To avoid awkwardnesses like lockers, allow me to recast the OP as jumping back to when I started at the school as a new boy. This is secondary school, right? So starting age 11 or 13 here in the UK depending upon state or private education. I think the key thing I would take back is that sometimes it’s necessary to fight back. I was dreadfully bullied at school and because I was always taller than my peers I knew would have been the one punished. But I didn’t grasp the concept of long term effects: I would have been seen as someone who stood up for himself. I would have participated more in sports and after I’d demonstrated my uselessness would ask to be a linesman, scorer, or umpire - anything to take part.
I’d still be mad keen on computers but channel that keenness to a proper profession.
Definitely pet my old dog. He’d probably wonder why I was blubbering. I’d impress the high school librarian with my library skills to the point where she says, “you should really think about being a librarian.” Ask my high school crush out, and when she turns me down say “that’s ok; I’ll end up married to a brunette, liberal, Jewish version of you.” Same height and body type, born within a month of each other, same spitting gap between the front teeth. Then I’d get the hell out of there.
