O O Ø O O O O
High School Confidential
When I look back on it, my high school experience pretty much sucked.
I was in a French Immersion program and hated it. I hated it mainly because they gave me a little green book with a tonne of verbs in it and said “repeat after me”. They didn’t follow it up with “by the way, this is what you’re repeating“, and I never bothered to look in a French-English dictionary so I guess it was my own damn fault. It would have been nice, however, if they had explained what the hell they were doing instead of just doing it.
My French grammar teacher thought I was hopeless. He spoke very little English, and made it pretty clear he thought I was an idiot… repeatedly. There was a group of kids who didn’t like him very much - well, no one liked him very much, he was a fromage head - and tormented him every opportunity they got. Knowing he was being made fun of, but not knowing how exactly he was being made fun of, he’d take it out on me by always asking me questions when my “WTF?” light was on. Thanks, teach.
The course I thought I’d love, electrical tech shop, was lunacy. Our teacher would go on at great lengths about lab safety. He’d warn us about the power supplies and how dangerous they were. He made us sit through a month of theory before letting us touch any lab equipment. He’d regale us with tales of dismemberment and electrocution, and how the single “D” cell he occasionally walked around with could kill you under the right conditions - he just never mentioned what those conditions were. Of course, when he actually did let us touch the gear we’d invariably short the leads across the high-voltage power terminals because the bang was cool and the smoke from the small electrical fire came in handy for an early dismissal on a Friday afternoon.
English was amazing. My teacher, Mr. Young, was a complete bastard. I’ve never been one to accept someone else’s interpretation just because. I always thought literature was highly subjective, and that so long as you could prove your point or make an intelligent argument for your point, you were ok. Not so, and I got my first dose of how the world really works courtesy of that dickwad when he’d fail me for interpreting things “incorrectly“. He was another one who’d call me out and make an example of me. At one point - more on that specific time in a second - he told my parents that my cranial capacity was not adequate for high school, and that serious thought should be given to putting me in a vocational school instead.
I had no friends, and the older kids knew it. To show they knew it, and to further reinforce it, they’d seek me out at lunch and kick the shit out of me for fun. Because, you know, as another life lesson it’s good to know that if it’s five on one or higher, you’re completely screwed. It made Darwin make a hell of a lot more sense, and also imparted the valuble lesson that it’s best not to laugh when you have cracked ribs.
After learning a number of these lessons, I decided high school probably wasn’t for me. My mom and dad both worked at the time, so I’d go to the bus stop and wait until I knew they were both at work. At about 9:30am I’d head back home, and spend the day watching Donahue, game shows, and soaps. I also read a lot. As I’m sure you could imagine, my school noticed my absence quickly, and decided after 28 straight (school) days away that it might be a good idea to see what was going on with young Kevin. Yes, 28 days, and the only reason it was that quick was because of my biology teacher, who was worried I was really sick.
My parents were surprisingly cool about the whole thing. On the 29th day I followed my normal routine, and there was mom and dad at the table. They asked “wtf?”, and then it was time for meetings with my teachers and the administration. The administration was brilliant, and informed my parents that because of the amount of personal time off I had taken, that I would be suspended for 2-4 weeks. My parents, being educators, were somewhat surprised, and asked me to leave the room. I left the room, heard some yelling and, when I was invited back, was informed by a somehat flushed administrator that I was not suspended, after all (to which my only thought was “fuck, I really wanna know if Victor’s still banging Nikki”).
Long story short, I was grounded to my room until I caught up. I passed everything, including recovering from a mid-year mark of 28 in Mr. Young’s English class, much to his chagrin.
That was grade nine.
From that point on I stayed under the radar and friendless until grade 11, where I met some folks who are still my friends today. I’m pretty sure we all made it though because we all discovered booze, and learned that the social lessons taught in the dog-eat-dog school world were just as important (well, more so, actually) as the academic ones. I was a horrendously bad influence and turned my straight-A friend into a low-B’s friend (and his mom still hates me for it :) ). I struggled through the rest of high school, scoring high nineties in anything to do with maths and science and low sixties in anything social. I never got a rec because I continued to skip. I had a girlfriend for exactly three days, and it ended because she was pissed off that I went into an arcade when she said she didn’t want to (after going into 20-odd clothing stores prior). I thought this was stupid, and told her so. You can see I understood women then about as much as I do now.
I never fit into a clique, and wasn’t sad at all when high school ended. There were some good times, and some tremendous parties when the family went off to Notre Dame for two weeks in the summer, but for the most part it sucked. I can think of two teachers from the school I truly liked, and they’re no longer in Canada. I can count the number of people I’d like to see from my graduating class using nothing more than my fingers. I had put the whole high school thing out of my head, and haven’t really thought of it since.
So why have I rambled on about high school this evening? Why am I sharing all these inanities with you? Well, besides the standard “because I gots nuttin else” response, there’s this:
I got a note from one of those friends that this year was my 20th anniversary of graduating from HS (shut up, all of you who graduated less than 20 yrs ago, I know I’m getting all wrinkly). Twenty years. That’s a long time and, considering I just relived anything noteworthy from high school with all y’all just now, you’d think I’d have it out of my system.
I don’t. I’m morbidly curious to see what everyone looks like. I’m even more curious to see what happened to the people who made life miserable for me. That, and I’d really, really like to see if Greg Brille will finally pony up and pay back everyone who ponied up for his fuck-tardedness when we got kicked out of Smuggler’s and the state of Vermont. Yes, Greg, I remember pleading with the nice state trooper to give me my stuff back because I wasn’t at the party as you stumbled out of your condo, near-empty bottle of Southern Comfort in hand.
But hey, as the narrator in Hammy says: “but that’s another story.”
I hated high school. I haven’t thought or cared about the overwhelming majority of people I went to high school with in years. I was ok with not knowing where everyone was until that email landed on my Thunderbird. And yet… and yet… I am mystified by how much I am drawn by the historical train wreck that was my childhood. I probably won’t go… but I just may, because there are a very few people I would like to see again.
This…. this is why I haven’t invented flying cars, floating cities, and a Mr. Fusion appliance for every home. How can I possibly launch into the future if we’re so caught up in the past?
Oh, right. Because I’m not terribly freaking bright, and I like watching train wrecks.
Kev Needham
April 4, 2006
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