high school

I think high school is pretty much just a place to keep adolescents while they learn and become. The stretched-out bridge between learning basic things (elementary and middle school) and learning advanced things (college). One long transition in preparation for a much larger transition.

In high school I've learned a lot. Most of it was never included in a syllabus or lesson plan, though. I've learned such things as how not to be afraid of being myself, how not to care what others think of me, how to follow my own intuition and beliefs instead of conforming to the expectations of others. High school is quite a good place to learn such a lesson - in the safety of private-school walls with watchful teachers - but in the whirling private world of students, half-formed opinions like toddlers crashing into each other, habits and prejudices spreading through the air down every hallway.

There are more specific, less gradual things I have learnt in high school too.

In tenth grade English class I first discovered the philosophy of transcendentalism, which is to this day basically the closest thing I have to describe my spirituality. I still get a thrill when reading about it, and remember the first time I saw headlines in Mr StJean's class like "Self-Reliance" and "finding the Divine in nature" and felt my heart beat a bit more quickly because it was exactly what I had believed for a long time. I found my favorite author, Henry Thoreau, who is still today the author whom I love the most.

Actually I discovered most of my favorite books in high school - books that I now can't imagine living without... Pride and Prejudice, I Capture the Castle, Anne of Green Gables, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Walden of course, and Swallows and Amazons, The Blue Castle, The Scarlet Letter and Lord of the Rings... I remember the first time I read each of these books and the memories are vivid and golden and friendly. Some of them were read in the back of classrooms, disguised as textbooks, their words enjoyed between glances at the teacher to make sure I wasn't being noticed. I read some of The Fellowship of the Ring waiting in the nurse's office to go home and whenever the seasons change I take to re-reading Walden on the bus-ride in...

In contrast, though, high school also taught me what I do not like and what I do not want to be. For one thing, I do not want to do things in the boring or stuffy way that much material was presented to us students in high school... I hope to never write a research paper in a precise choking format again... I will be colorful and exuberant because I have hated the dull grey tone of a lot of my high school education... And I will view knowledge as alive and growing and living instead of dead and dissectable because poking and prodding at it has depressed me all through high school.

And I cannot forget my high school friends. I have four very, very close lifelong friends who do not go to school with me, whom I have known since I was five, six, seven, and our relationships have become stronger throughout high school - but in school I also have a group of amazing friends whom I love. Some may say what they will about high school friendships, that they aren't deep or true, but we have all learnt from each other, I think, and given something to each other throughout high school.

So really, high school has been, totalled up, and including hours spent out of school, incredible. Often, classes got in the way of learning... But I think that really, looking at it, I learned something important every day, sometimes without even knowing.