Short Story: I Hated High School
A look at my anxious time as a high school student
I look around the dim classroom, and I see my honors English teacher smiling as she talks about Shakespeare’s Othello. She is dissecting a scene from Act I, and I joke about how Othello would make more sense under the influence of weed. Everyone laughs, including my teacher, and we continue the class by taking notes about Latin and Greek root words that are supposed to help us understand some of Shakespeare’s words a little better. I feel safe in this space to be myself, and I lean my head back then close my eyes for a minute, perfectly content.
I enrolled in a college-level art class even though I am only a sophomore. The teacher here is an old, sweet lady, but she has no control over the class. She is of retirement age, but she refuses to retire, probably out of need. She is the embodiment of depression: slow, dull, with expressionless eyes that look at you lacking all essence of life. But every once in a while, she gives us a warm smile and joke. It is rare, but I think that makes those moments that much more special. My classmates joke that she is so depressed because her husband hits her. I do not think that is true, though. For some reason, there are several seniors mixed in this class with a handful of underclassmen. All the seniors are perpetually high, pregnant, or hardly in school, preferring to take pills at raves than to prepare for their future. A handful of them have been working on ceramics in class, one of them crafting a bong that she intends to use during lunch when she visits the home of one of the jocks. I listen to trance on my iPod as I draw a lumberjack gnome standing in front of his mushroom house in an enchanted forest. Today is our teacher’s birthday, and several of the male seniors decide to give our teacher a lap dance while another pretends to be a DJ with his cell phone. Then one of the seniors takes a seat near me and my best friend (also a sophomore) then proceeds to flirt with my friend.
My speech class is a rather similar experience. I have some of the same seniors in it, and there are only a handful of us underclassmen in it. It was supposed to provide us with college credit, but for some reason never explained to us, it did not. This class in particular, I avoid as much as possible. I have to prepare and give pointless speeches on the verge of an anxiety attack while standing in front of the bright classroom, with desks separated into two sides, all facing toward the front. I am essentially graded on my ability to control anxiety while everyone stares at me talk about a shoe box with personally meaningful items in it. The teacher does not seem to like me either, perhaps because I am too edgy in my speeches, or maybe because I always come across as full of anger. Combined with the fact that I have no friends in that class, these discomforts prompt me to skip this class as much as possible. I either find a teacher that will provide a safe haven, roam the halls, or blend in with the physical education crowd outside. Sometimes, when no one is looking, I just walk off campus to my house. Later, I would find this teacher rejected my admission to the “honors society.” The same teacher that had a different outfit for each day of the school year because she wanted to impress everyone and clearly deserved to be extraordinarily unique. She thought I would not find out it was because of her.
My math class is one of the last classes of the day, and I decide to take a restroom break, not because I have to go to the restroom. Anxiety rises during this class for some reason, and walking helps me calm down a bit. My teacher, sympathizing with me as a person who also suffers from anxiety, would let me walk out whenever I needed. I did not even have to tell her. She could read me, and she would say, “You can go to the restroom.” I really appreciated her because most people in my life did not believe in anxiety and the accommodations I needed at the time required a certain level of trust from the adults in charge. They had to trust that I really needed to step out and was not just doing it to get out of doing things. “I would gladly do any of these ‘difficult’ projects you want if I could just feel like a normal person,” I would tell them. It was true. All I wanted was to live a normal life free from whatever disease was plaguing my brain.
On my way back from the restroom, I hear security guards running and yelling telling someone to get to class. This is not at all out of the norm for my high school. A few weeks ago, I saw a student running from the security guards and jump from the second floor to the first floor then continue running from them. It was impressive because the height from the second to the first floor must have been at least 20 feet. I do not think much of it and take my time getting to the classroom. When I arrive, my best friend asks to go next. She leaves, and a minute later, a lockdown is announced. Apparently, an armed individual who was being chased by police made his way into the un-gated school. SWAT arrived shortly thereafter. No one was injured, and according to the local news, “the school was on total lockdown mere seconds after the unarmed individual entered.”
It is beyond me why I decided to become a teacher when this was a typical day at my high school and not even close to the really bad things I saw. However, my experience as a teacher was different. I loved being a teacher, but I hated the politics of it. As a student, maybe my high school could not provide me with the best experience at that time. I felt like high school highlighted the worst of humanity for me. Maybe I chose to filter out the good back then. Who knows? I do know I was depressed. Maybe I just became a teacher because I wanted to make a positive difference in the lives of students the way the handful of good teachers did for me and protect others from going through what I did. Maybe it was because of the vast majority of horrible teachers that I wanted to be more like one of the good ones.
Above all, what I now know is this: there are many good and bad experiences that we go through in life. We do not always have control over those situations because many times, it is a new experience. What we can control is our reaction and our perception. Are we going to let these experiences debilitate us, or are we going to use it as the reason to be better?
P.S. Next week’s post will be about my thoughts on how to help students of all ages to have a better experience in school.