High School Reminiscing

[beantownbubba]

Spent 2nd half of 10th grade in a physical high school. Meh.

This thread isn't fostering any regret about not staying longer.

Regrets?? Aren't you still in high school?

Haha... it's complicated. My last two years of high school were spent in university, counted for both; "dual-enrollment". Just graduated HS, and have two years left for my Undergrad. And yet I left out the s...

Never heard of that. It sounds great in many ways (especially financial!!). Can you provide a link that describes this program in more detail?

[Mike127]

Reposted because this is where it belongs:

In high school, I kind of floated among alot of different groups, never quite fitting into any of them. I was "nerdy" but my nerd interests weren't the typical sci-fi/fantasy stuff that the other nerds were into. I was in marching band for 2 years, but I hated it and quit. I was into weird music and had longish hair, but the weird music I liked was different than what the other freaks were into - in my school there were the skaters/straight edge kids into hardcore and the stoners into the usual suspects - I liked college rock/early indie/shoegaze/and the more canonized punk bands, and while I didn't do drugs or drink, I wasn't into skating or veganism and definitely wasn't interested in being celibate by choice. I was/am completely nonathletic, but I ran cross country because it was a sport where all that was expected was to show up and try to have fun, and that gave me a small amount of credibility with some of the football/basketball jocks, many of whom were stereotypical assholes, but just as many were always cool with me - in fact, one of the football players ended up opening a very nice record store, while I'm the music obsessed geek who ended up in a corporate job.

This was the early 90s and I was on proto internet services like Prodigy, BBS's and newsgroups & I also made about 10 issues of a silly zine - through those things, I made alot of friends around the country that way. And if I look at the best friendships that have carried through to this day, those are the people I think of more than the ones I went to school with.

Overall, I definitely can't say it's a time I look back on fondly, but I see many of the threads of who I became having their start in those years. I guess all this is to say that stereotypes are only really relevant at the extremes and to the extent that you let them define you. I was definitely an oddball in high school (still am), and was bullied/picked on my fair share (though to be honest, high school was a breeze compared to middle school). That said, I think the experience is different depending on where you live, I grew up in a middle class suburb of a major midwestern city with a moderate amount of diversity. A kid from Muscle Shoals who was at the top of the social heap at his/her school, would probably have been ostracized as a "hick" at my school, whereas Patterson might have found a few more like minded people.

[LastLawson]

Haha... it's complicated. My last two years of high school were spent in university, counted for both; "dual-enrollment". Just graduated HS, and have two years left for my Undergrad. And yet I left out the s...

Never heard of that. It sounds great in many ways (especially financial!!). Can you provide a link that describes this program in more detail?

This gives a pretty good overview: http://www.fldoe.org/articulation/pdf/d ... llfaqs.pdf

You can either do dual-enrollment full-time, with no HS courses, or only take a couple of DE courses. I did the former.

And yes, it's a great deal financially!

[Duke Silver]

I always enjoy reading about other people's HS experiences, probably because mine was so atypical. My school was affiliated with the church my family belonged to at the time, and it was small. Like, about 50 people K-12 small. There were six of us in my graduating class and I'm pretty sure that was the largest class in the school's history. Graduating classes of 1 were not uncommon.

Despite the size we still had the usual archetypal characters, I guess. We had a gay dude (came out after HS, obviously), a black guy, a slut, a couple jocks, some gang-bangers (not that kind). Obviously those cliques overlapped. The gay dude would get called a fairy on the playground on Monday, then start at center on the basketball team on Friday. I played sports but got labeled as weird for being a music obsessive and doing a lot of creative writing. The worst I can say for myself is that it was awkward at times. Nothing unusually traumatic happened. The after effects of the religious aspect were harder to overcome than the social aspect.

Obviously being a straight white male didn't hurt. I think it was a lot harder for the girls (our church had Taliban-esque rules regarding dress) and our gay classmate.

The school opened the year I was born and closed a few years after I graduated. I attended all 13 years, K-12. I keep in touch with two of my classmates regularly, and the rest just kinda float out there in the Facebook ether. There's talk of a reunion (encompassing the school's entire history) every few years, but it never goes anywhere. Half the people want to hold it at the church, the other half at a bar.

[pa_heathen]

I was a loner in high school. I never found where I really fit in. I had some acquaintances, but no real close friends. I floated by, but couldn't wait for it to end. Now some odd years later classmates seem to remember everything about me. They talk about how cool I was. Maybe I was always that intriguing girl in the corner to them.