I have a few touchy subjects, I'll admit (but doesn't everyone?).
One of my friends called me out the other day, with a comment in email about how we've never talked much about what high school was like. High school for me was nothing like Beverly Hills 90210 (original version), which is what I imagined that it was actually supposed to be like, at least for teenagers with more of the right stuff than I had. I usually try not to remember it.
Anyway, I took this was a challenge to come up with five good things to say about my time in high school. Here's the results:
5. A Few Feats of Brainpower - I was an essay-writing machine in high school, thus scoring a 90 and a 93 on my twelve grade diploma exams in English and Social Studies, respectively, which was really cool. I studied my ass off for the same exam in math, and managed to get an 80, which seemed ridiculously unachieveable in a subject that I was nearly failing three years earlier. So, I was happy with myself in that regard. But the exam that I laugh about the most was my final exam in eleventh-grade chemistry. It was my second year with the same lousy teacher, and despite my perfect attendence and note-taking and studying, I honestly had little clue what the guy was trying to teach. The final exam was worth 30% of my final grade, and I realized two days before the test that I'd still pass the class if I scored a zero. So, I stopped studying for my chemistry final; it felt fruitless and I had another final later that day, where I probably could do well if I refocused my efforts. Know what? I was one of seven people in my chemistry class (there would have been about 28 students in it) who passed the final exam. Thank goodness for muliple choice.
4. Eleventh Grade Biology - This tied for my favourite class in high school. I made quick friends with the guy sitting behind me, Steve, who told me tales of being on the football and rugby teams and his days at a french-language school in Ottawa before the bell would ring to signal the start of class. I've forgotten what I talked about. I remember thinking that his handwriting was really neat and he had excellent posture and really nice arms, so perhaps I was too busy studying him to be making witty conversation. By the end of the first month of school, Steve was totally my unrequited high school crush. Biology was also a highlight because my teacher orchestrated some awesome field trips. We went to the Royal Tyrell Museum in Drumheller (which everyone had probably been to before, but probably not traveled to on a bus with friends and not a lot of supervision, which was just a lot of fun). We went to tour the Alberta Medical Examiner's Office, and we saw the refridgeration room where toe-tags peeked out on bodies that were awaiting their autopsies.
3. Mr. McNeil, Social Studies Teacher and Great Orator - I was in Mr. McNeil's class for eleventh grade social studies. Even though I was sitting in a desk on the side of the room facing the windows overlooking the teachers' parking lot, it felt more like I was sitting in the audience of a dark theatre somewhere, watching a skilled actor soliloquise on Thomas Cromwell, the French Revolution, and occasionally, off-topic subjects like how he once managed to go into Zellers for a new watch battery and somehow left with a set of keys to the entire department store. It was one of those classes that was a pleasure to go to, and I don't remember anyone skipping it.
2. Advanced English in Gr. 11 - I guess that I loved my eleventh grade English class as much as I did Biology for many of the same reasons. I got to stare at and talk with my friend Steve again, and go on field trips. The field trips were one of the main appeals of the advanced class because the regular English classes didn't go on any. My teacher's name was Mr. G, and his passion for literature was so obvious when he was lecturing us on Beowulf and the poetry of John Donne. Having to talk to him one-on-one was really weird, though, because he was kind of stand-offish when he wasn't standing in the front of the classroom. We read Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer that year, and went to see it on stage at Edmonton's Citadel Theatre. I think that I had lunch out with Steve and two of the girls in our class before the play, and when the matinee started, we noticed that our teacher had snuck his boyfriend into the play. I didn't think of it at the time, but that might have been a bold thing to do twenty years ago, in 1992. The other field trip I took with my English class was to see a performance of Romeo and Juliet by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. I can't figure out why we went to see that, because we weren't studying the play in class, but I guess Mr. G just liked supporting the arts. It was cool, anyways. My favourite thing about my English class was reading The Lion in Winter by James Goldman. It started a several-years-long obsession with the Plantagenet kings for me.
And the #1 best thing in high school was:
1. Science Jeopardy Day - one day during the last week of classes in eleventh grade biology, our teacher asked the class if we were interested in playing Science Jeopardy instead of spending another day studying the endocrine system or something like that. The response was positive, and I remember that he grinned before tapping a deck of trivia cards on his worktable and saying, "Good. We'll play Steve and Laura versus The Rest of the Class." It was so much fun! Steve was my only competition academically in the class, and he loved trivia nearly as much as I did. We managed to stay a couple of points ahead of the rest of the class by the time that bell rang, signalling the end of the period, and everyone seemed to have had a lot of fun.
So, there. My five positive memories from high school. Maybe the next post here will be on topic - those kids of mine are supposed to be the protagonists around here!
