I didn't hate high school. I'd like to do my senior year over, though.
I didn't exactly hate high school, i.e. I wasn't constantly miserable or anything, but I'd never want to do it again. But college was a blast. Not liking highschool seems to be the consensus view here in the States, but I do meet a not insignificant number of people who loved it.
Oddly enough, almost every single one of the college and older students I taught in China looked back on highschool incredibly fondly and wistfully, but thought college wasn't much fun.
I just want to be really, really clear about this: There was some good stuff. Some fun.
But not for CASH DOLLARS would I go back there.
You can't make me.
Seriously -- perhaps the moment of deepest despair I've ever experienced was produced when, in tenth grade, my stepfather told me that I should be having more fun, because "these are the best years of your life!" And I thought, jeez, if this is it, maybe I just better stop now.
The good news is that my stepfather hadn't gone to college, and knew nothing about grad school. And, indeed, things got better.
Agreed on what KF said. I heard that "best years of your life" line too and had a similar reaction.
I'm trying to formulate why I didn't like it. I think a big part of it was living at home. I have great great parents, but by high school I was really chafing to be out on my own. Also, I don't know why peer pressure felt so pervasive and powerful in high school, but it did, and by comparison college felt like complete and absolute freedom.
KF, you had a better time in grad school than in high-school?? Are you Catholic?
Actually, grad school was a great time, but I attribute that to stopping at the MA.
What Mitch says about the freedom of college happened at the transition from junior-high to high-school for me. I wonder if school size is a factor? How big was our graduating class, Unf? 700? 800? Pretty big, in any case, and suddenly you didn't have to see the people you didn't want to see, and there was a new crew of interesting folks.
No. High school sucked. You remembered wrong. The smart peers were SO driven by "what school are YOU going to". EEw. The teachers were miserable Skinnerians. Mind? Never! You never socialized with ANYONE from that hell-hole. Your friends went to a different school. Your school was 50% jock and 50% rah. You were the minority weirdo who liked intellectual discourse and hated sports not for its own sake but that you could never imagine hanging out with THOSE PEOPLE. You couldn't wait to leave, and would nuke it now if given the opportunity. Hopefully some of the faculty still works there and will be vaporized. They were complicit in its acridity, and deserve no quarter.
My graduating class was, I think, around 500 or so, so I don't think size is the sole explanation. How did you avoid people you didn't want to see, or were those people just not in any of your classes?
Our school was, waddya call it? tracked? so a lot of the dimmer bulbs one never saw. The rest was mostly luck, both with individual classes and my homeroom crowd, which I saw every day all four years, and was just a very funny bunch of guys.
I had so much social anxiety I should probably be having my doctor check for ulcers.
Yeah, I was in all the AP classes, which helped a lot, although there are plenty of academically gifted assholes in the world too (they just don't tend to be able to express their assholishness in a muscularly, physical way). And each year was better than the previous, perhaps because of the approaching awareness that college changed all the old social calculus.
But it's not at all that people who aren't "academically-oriented" are bad, in fact many of my closest friends were from outside the Honors Classes crowd (and they're the people I'm still in touch with or at least most enjoy seeing at the reunions). It's just that in the honors class milieu you didn't get penalized for being "smart" (i.e. getting good grades and thinking that was a good thing).
But gym and health and numerous other classes were all required, you couldn't place out. And overall the social system of highschool felt like waking up, every single weekday morning, to the fact that that f*%$ing moron Bush had been re-elected President again. You get used to it, sure, but that doesn't mean you have to like it.
I'll depart from my usual policy of agreeing with everything ogged says in order to note that high school was pretty lousy. This was primarily because of my seriously dysfunctional parents but also because of the usual awkward adolescent issues. On the other hand, I'm still in touch with some of my friends from those years, and they're among my favorites of all time.
College was better, and grad school better than that. Thank god.
Yeah, I liked my high school a lot. I look back much more fondly on my high school as an institution than my college, which I still have really conflicted feelings about.
I think life was a bit simpler at a small, all-male catholic high school than at your average big public school. The social world of high school was just much simpler when it was all boys. I had a funny, goofy bunch of friends who had a lot of fun together. We weren't the coolest thing at school, but that really didn't matter much. Not much boy/girl drama, though most of us dated in our senior year. Sadly, I've lost touch with all those friends while I've been moving to a new state every two years.
In an effort to agree as much as possible with Fontana, I should point out that junior high was hell on earth.
Oddly, every single one of my close male friends is from high-school, and, as I suddenly realized a couple of years ago, I can't give first and last names for even ten other students from college. Grad school, again, was much better.
I think the thing about high school and college friends is that, before worklife, there was just a lot more quality time for bonding / doing goofy shit together / having formative experiences / etc.
So those friendships have been through more and are thus more durable.
I just had dinner with a friend of mine from high school and it was an awful evening. This was the friend who figured out how to sneak out and go to rock shows when I never could, and hated the town we lived in, dated college guys and on top of having way more fun than I did, generally found a way to remind me at every interaction how uncool I was. And I found myself thinking after dinner, no wonder high school sucked, because I spent my time trying to keep up with miserable people like these. I'd like to say that college rocked, that life improved, but I made a grave error and went to college in the middle of rural Indiana. So I have clearly made some bad choices along the way. I have to say that the life about two years after college and life about two year after gradschool were the very best. And I wouldn't change a thing.
I'm conversing with a high school friend right now.
He's telling me to punch myself in the solar plexus.
Hey, I had fun at a college in the middle of rural Indiana, although I agree it was a bad choice, considering how much more fun college could hae been.
In retrospect high school was fun, but at the time, with an teenager's mindset, it rollercoastered between being awesome and sucking worse than anything has ever sucked since.
Ogged, my Junior High was named Downer. Apropos much?
Freshman year sucked. Senior year was pretty cool and easy.
College was mostly only fun, especially for a Theater Arts major, and once I turned 21.
Wow. Go to a long boring meeting, and stuff happens here.
KF, you had a better time in grad school than in high-school?? Are you Catholic?
How could you tell? Yes, dear sweet friends of mine used to enjoy tormenting me with that damned Billy Joel song. Yes, I was... shall we say, sheltered for a very long time. And, to top it off, I was a year ahead of my age group in school, so as everybody got driver's licenses, I didn't, and as everybody got into R-rated movies, I didn't (yes, I grew up in one of those towns where they checked), and all along, everybody just kinda looked at me like some too-smart-for-her-own-good little punk kid who would ruin the fun if she was around.
Now grad school: grad school had it all over college, even. Mostly because I had finally recovered from the first boyfriend from hell, who I stumbled across my freshman year in college, and who I stupidly stuck with all the way through. But also because we drank better beer. And god, it was New York. How could it not have been better?
But yes. Catholic. Guilty as charged. Or just plain guilty, which is a rather permanent state.
who I stupidly stuck with all the way through
You too, eh? Is the hellish first serious relationship a rite of passage, or what?
I studied my ass off at high school. Simultaneously, I was one of the goofiest kids in high school ( I am still goofy, but carefully so). I had funny friends, and I played football and I was good at it. I was extremely shy with girls, but that all went away in college and I belive I found the magic trick of communicating with the opposite sex in college. My first serious relationship was in college, and yes, it was a rite of passage for me as well. Looking back, I am unsure as to whether I had more fun in high school or in college; however, one thing is for sure: everyone had more expectations of me in college and that made it harder. Somehw I regret being shy when in high school, and I regret being too outgoing in college. All said, I owe where I am now to those years, in high school, and in college. No other regrets, specially since I had a blast.
it rollercoastered between being awesome and sucking worse than anything has ever sucked since
Yep, in the teenage years, the highs were much higher and the lows much lower. It's weird, but before the teenage years, I think the highs were just as high, if not higher, but the lows didn't stick around or feel so bad as they did once teenagedom hit.
Junior high school sucked. I was angry all the time, and not for any reason that I can identify today. High school was a little better, but I chalk that up mostly to the combination of latchkey kid status and marijuana. I certainly wouldn't return to either willingly.
Aside from the psycho girlfriend, college was grand.
man, I don't know what you were smoking in high schol, ogged, but it must have been better than what I had. It's rue that middle school was worse, but high school was also a living hell. not that I don't have some fond memories, but shee-it. of course, my life totally sucked in many non-school ways as well. all in all, the fact that I only tried to kill myself once in 10th grade is a slightly misleading indicator of how much I hate hih school.
um, hated high school. preview is my friend! not.
I wonder how much of it is high school per se that sucked for so many of us, or adolescence itself. My vote is for the latter. In many ways, although I did hate high school, it was also there that I made/nurtured the friendships that helped me deal with the suckiness.
As I said earlier, it was striking to me in China that basically everyone I met looked back fondly on that period of their lives but didn't much like university. And Chinese high school seemed to me much more high-pressure, both in terms of academics and conformity, than high school here.
I don't really know how to explain that, although when I taught at a college my first year my students seemed "young for their age" (vis a vis Americans of the same age). It felt like I was teaching highschool students, except that they were very much less jaded than those snarky teens over here. Talking to other teachers, we would often remark on how "infantile" they were. But overall they seemed much happier though than the same age students I've worked with in the States.
From Junior year on was fantastic. I think for many basically introverted people, there's a moment in adolescence where the universe flips, and you become comfortable with who you are, talking to other people, etc. Not to suggest that anybody in this thread fits that bill, but I suspect the timing of this "flip" rather than any specific aspects of high school vs. junior high vs. college determine what you remember fondly.
I think there are definite societal aspects to it too, though. One possible explanation for my observations in China is that it seemed that adolescents weren't expected to be or treated like "young adults". There didn't really even seem to be a concept of teenager.
Basically they were treated like children until after high school or even college, i.e. they weren't given any important responsibilities or decisions to make until much later in life. I think. For example, the concept of leaving home at 18 seemed very strange to them, they couldn't understand why anyone would want to, they thought it was cruel to the kids.
I don't know if that helps to explain it or not, or even if my observations were accurate. For example it could be that the miserable teens didn't make it to college and so I never taught them. But maybe less decisions to make meant less anxiety which meant happier teen years, I don't know, and obviously there are serious drawbacks to treating teens that way too.