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High School Experience
How was your high school experience? If it was fun, what were some the best aspects about it and what was the best moment in high school? If it sucked, what didn't you like about it and what made it so bad?
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From then on I started writing for the school paper and founded our school rock band. My school life has changed a lot. I experienced that being a geek isn't to bad in a US high school, since there are lots of other geeks you can mingle with. But in Germany there are about 2 geeks in my whole school and all the others are forcing themselves to be normal.
I know I got a bit off-track there, but all I can say to anyone in school is that you should never care what people think of you and fucking be your self!
Well I went to 3 high schools. I went to Surrattsville for a few months and I got BS from students and teachers and would fight back or cuss them out. I'd walk out of class when I wanted, I stopped caring about grades, I fucked shit up and people up both ways. After getting kicked out of my aunts
I went to DC's H.D.W high. I did the same stuff as before except I got even more BS for having different clothes and a "white girl voice" I skipped more classes, fucked up more shit, destroyed a classroom in anger, almost failed out, and had forced counseling. On the other side I was a closet geek who was in chess club (I don't remember how to play! :P)liked anime, played in the orchestra (don't remember how to play flute! :P)and academics team. (The school was very very low on smarts. An average student could get A's if they felt like it)
At the 3rd school, Suitland, I changed my act and dressed girly, liked boy bands and met many anime fans. I was in art club, drama club and computer club and I trekked to the comic shop after school with my first group of real friends to play Yugioh, watch anime, and listen to rock. I still tried to normalized but eventually I got out of the geek closet. My last two years at Suitland were awesome and I only had one fight and one enemy. A new record! We even had a school trip to Katsucon! It was fun almost everyday being a geek instead of trying to be hardcore and react to the BS.
Never let the bullshit get you down!
Find an interest, a hobby, a sport, or school sponsored activity. Keep busy, and enjoy yourself, and find like minded people to share your experiences. NEVER EVER let anyone tell you "You can't do that." in regard to your career choice. If you have a dream work for it. Life is not fair, and it's not easy, but that doesn't mean you can't live your dream.
Basically if I'm in a class with some of my friends I have a great time going to class and actually enjoy school. But for half the day I'm in classes with people that I neither know, nor really care about. I just think I'll be a lot happier once I'm out, since it's getting increasingly hard to talk with non-tech oriented people. Most of the people I have to put up with in the off classes are either assholes or take too many drugs for me to care about them. I wish I could skip class, but teacher take attendance, and if I miss 5 classes I get an F and have to take a Saturday school. Tennis season is always fun and speeds up the rest of the year.
Regarding the Penny Arcade comic strip, "Gabriel goes back to speak at his old high school", I actually thought very hard about this when I was in high school. It got me through a lot of tough times. However, you have to realize that we don't actually run anything in the real world. Geeks might be essential to the workings of everyday modern life, but the jocks are still in charge of most everything in the end.
When I was in high school I was THE weird art girl of the school. My best friends were a puerto rican wiccan girl with pink hair and a boy who loved Pink Floyd, philosophy, and freaking squares. I was interested in a lot of things (sports, music, anime) which brought me into contact with a wide variety of groups and cliques, and chameleon-like I wandered between them without really belonging to any. I was simultaneously of the jocks and the nerds, tolerated on the very fringes of the popular lunch table, but just as often hanging out with the D & D boys. I got picked on what seemed like a lot, but was probably the average amount (understand, even the popular kids bully on each other like crazy) for offenses ranging from liking rabbits (hunters, mostly) to having short hair and playing hard at floor hockey (I lost count of how many times I was called a dyke) to not owning a television (some kids thought that meant I must be...Amish?!) My sister got the same stuff, but had a much more punk-rock attitude to go along with it, and a talent for sarcasm that could take the wind out of any prep's sails. But it bothered me. I wanted everyone to like me, and in junior high I went through enormous pains to play the part of a "cool" teenage girl. It was only until later in my high school career (mostly after I moved back from Japan) when I stopped playing the game and just started to chill and do my own thing. Here are my three pieces advice.
1. If someone bullies you the most effective way to get them to stop is act "whatever, dude" even if you are really angry or sad. Don't lose your temper and fight them: They treat you like you're dumb, you just one up them on it. Roll those eyes. Take their taunt and make a joke of it. Steal that fire and once they realize that their not going to get a fun reaction out of you they'll give up. Easier said than done, but give it a try. I've seen it work.
2. Act like you think you are awesome, and all the things you like are awesome. Instead of trying to act "normal" or "cool" take whatever makes you weird and act like its cool. People will be like "what's up with that?" at first, but if you can stick it out they will start to wonder if maybe it is cool too. I've seen fads start this way. Don't feel guilty or ashamed of your interests and traits. My friends would do weird shit all the time and if they looked like they were having fun, then people would start to get interested.
3. The third advice is that it doesn't matter. As the Count of Monte Cristo says "Matte, soshite kibou seyo" or "Wait and hold out hope." College rocks. I got to film school, and found it was full of people who had considered themselves "odd art loners" in high school and suddenly found themselves among others who thought the same thing. In college you will find people with similar interests, for sure. You go into a geeky major, it will be mostly geeks. (I remember consoling a frat-boy animator because all the other students were picking on him for being a jock).
The hopeful story I wanted to tell, is that a few days ago I saw on Facebook that a girl who went to my high school was living in Yonkers. Now she and I weren't really friends in high school, for she was a popular jock and I was a geek artist. But I decided to IM her for kicks, and be like "Dude, you moved near NY?" We started talking, and I realized that out of the high school social structure we were just two people. When I told her about my job, she said "That is so cool!" and we talked for a while. Just remember that high school drama and popularity is mostly illusionary. Everyone is a person, who worries about stuff and wants to be liked. The most you can do is realize that everyone is a little bit insecure (I think that's why teenagers try to make a pecking order in the first place, because they want power over others to erase their own lack of self-confidence) High School goes away, and you realize how silly it all was. If I could put myself back 10 years to when I was 13, I would have a lot to tell past me. Just try to have fun and do your own thing and it will all be well.
Basically how it worked was everyone would have a TA group to sign into in the morning, and after everyone got their lanyards and heard the announcements, all the students went off and did their own thing for the day. The main thing to do was go to a resource center, get out a learning guide and whatever books you needed for whatever you were working on at the moment, then go find a desk in the resource center and work from it. If you needed help with something, you could ask one of the TAs on duty in the resource center, or go see if a specific TA was down in their office. Depending on which courses you had, there were also seminars for individual units scheduled at certain times every week that you could go to based on how they best fit into your schedule, kinda like how college classes work (e.g.: there were three different Drama seminars per grade, each once a week for three hours, and every time a new unit started up, you could chose one series of seminars to attend; for English, there were just seminars for every unit in every grade held all the time, and you just had to see when your unit's seminar was coming up next). For tests, you could go up to the testing center whenever you felt ready, the ladies at the front desk there would give you one of four or five different versions of your test (to discourage cheating), and you would go and do it either at one of the desks, or at a computer if it was an essay test. Course, it was still possible to cheat a bit, as those multiple choice tests were laminated, and sometimes students would made indented circles on the test that would let future test-takers have a clue as to what the answers probably were.
As for the environment of the school, I don't know if other people there had problems, but I certainly felt much more comfortable there than I did in my junior high. I had maybe three or four friends over the course of junior high. While I was never physically bullied, I did get teased a lot for being the art girl who spent recess and lunch either in the library or sitting by the wall and drawing. In high school, I found someone to talk with on the first day, got introduced to her friends, found connections to other friends through them, and so on and so on until I had a nicely-sized group of close friends and a pretty large number of people that I knew and was friendly with throughout the rest of the school. In general, I felt there were a lot more intelligent, cool people there than at any other school I'd ever been to, probably because a lot of the dumb/less motivated kids dropped out and switched schools halfway through grade ten. I'm sure there was some stereotypical clique action going on, but it wasn't nearly to the extent that I had been expecting. When the strongest and most visible clique in the entire school is the Drama kids, you know something's going right. ^^
The worst part of going to that school was probably, um, finishing. ^^;; As you can expect, with a school that didn't know where each student was at all times, there were plenty of opportunities to just hang out and do fuck-all. Ahh, three-hour lunch breaks... Not doing school work went to such an extent that there was even a legendary challenge known around the school as The Montana Challenge. The task was to go to check-in in the morning, then immediately leave, drive out of Canada and into Montana, pick up a souvenir, and drive back before the end of the school day to be back for check-out. A lesser, more-often-attempted version of this was the Edmonton Challenge.
Other highlights of high school: Japanese class; being in school plays; supporting the school improv team; anime club; doing the comic for the school newspaper; going to DramaFest; hanging out playing cards in the cafeteria all day.
Other lowlights: "Fireside Chats" (aka: the administration calls the student body to the gym and yells at them for being lazy punk kids); the evil vice-principal ("GET TO A RESOURCE CENTER NOW, PEON!"); Physics; Math 30; the inside of the school somewhat resembled a prison and had few windows.
So, yeah, high school was mostly awesome for me. Go Cardinals! ^_^