Hopefully not the "best years of your life."

I want to cry when people say that high school is/was “the best time of your life.” If that’s the case, I should probably just give up now. Until my junior year, I was just bored with classes and eaten with social anxiety- school was pretty unpleasant. The daily social anxiety that came from being a high school girl first and a person with real problems second was wearing, to say the least, and I know I don't even know the worst of it. The essay “Stuck in Traffic” had me laughing out loud and reading some of the parts aloud to my boyfriend, who went to the same high school. I related to so many of her complaints it was almost sad: “I hike through the hallways. I fall asleep. I wake up to some guy puking all over the floor. I go to the bathroom and check to see if there’s a fire in the wastebasket. You know, the usual.”

Around my junior year, though, I became even more heavily involved with the school newspaper (despite the fact that I’d been the editor for two years, it counted for more once we had a competent advisor that didn’t miss weeks of work at a time) and started to realize the inadequacies of the school through research and, well, just generally starting to question. We were consistently a “D” school (at least) by Hillsborough County’s standards, and we were never getting the amount of funding we needed. To put this problem in context, my school was in the middle of one of the “worst” neighborhoods in Tampa, and the school board decided to add a math and science magnet program to- you guessed it- attract rich kids (and their parents) to the school. The line between the magnet students and “traditional” students was thick with questions of race and literacy, and nearly all of the funding that the school did manage to get went into the pockets of the magnet program, in hopes that the magnet students would raise the school’s grade. We never did, and the pressure was constantly on. Soon, even in our engineering and science classes, we were being taught to the FCAT and not to learn.

But I could rant for way more than five hundred words about the Florida school system and its “grading” systems and funding decisions, so I’ll leave it at that. There were other problems, too- school was a battlefield. Bathroom fires, bomb threats, and fights in the courtyard were every day events. Once I watched a girl repeatedly beat another girl with the heel of her pump on campus. They were ignored, being that the last bell had rung and they were near the buses. The administrators spent so much time breaking up fights that there was no time to focus on real problems, like literacy. Thinking back on this, the "Have cycle, will study" article really raises some questions for me. My school could do a much better job of encouraging literacy and giving the community the resources students needed to succeed, but it was just flawed and inefficient. Now there's rumors that the school is being shut down in the coming years. A failed plan to help the inner-city students.

What’s more is that the magnet program didn’t quite appreciate the students it had, particularly those of the female persuasion. There were so few of us we were pretty much a joke. The guys would high-five and celebrate when a girl was in their magnet class (provided she was pretty enough), and there was a teacher that some of the girls called “Daddy” (please, please don’t get me started there). One of my girlfriends and I used to joke that we were admitted only because they needed some girls to make the numbers look good. As I remember, though, there were more girls in the classes under me, so maybe they got a little better at that. A lot like Laura, who wrote “Black Letter Days,” once I started opening my eyes, I learned so much more about the system and was able to bond with other students through that- both traditional and magnet, and boys as well as the (few) girls. Essentially, I believe the system (both the board and the school itself, the teachers and students all perpetuating it) would align with the research that put girls at a disadvantage and prove that it was really tricky for us to navigate. But we did, and though an alarming amount of my high school friends are now pregnant or married or both, we bonded through it and grew together.

I would have thought one of those bonding experiences should have been prom, but of course it wasn’t that simple. Reading the essay about prom helped me to realize why I was so dissatisfied with the whole process of it- it definitely didn’t turn out to be some self-actualizing milestone in my life. Once I was a senior, I could hardly bring myself to care- but I went through the motions anyway. And when we arrived- my date and my best friend, with her date- it took all the willpower we had (most of it came from the fifty dollar ticket price) not to leave. It was hardly the glamorous end to our high school career that we all imagined it would be. It was a mirror of our high school experience, only in a kind-of twinkling convention center “ballroom” with a too-small dancefloor and lackluster chocolate fountain. I remember distinctly thinking something along the lines of “this is how I felt all four years, only condensed- I’m not the prettiest; this is ridiculous- how dumb is he? I’m sort of uncomfortable, and oh God, I really don’t want to dance like that; and why is she looking at me that way?”

Comments

Natasha said…
I always hated how people referred to High school as the best years of their life. I totally hated high school and I knew then as I know now they were not and will never be the best years of my life. They should change that saying to the totally insignificantly awkward years that lead to frustration and disillusionment. I guess that saying might be too long, but way more accurate.
Mary Morley said…
I like it. I bet it would catch on.

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