High School

For years I had a recurring dream where I was frantically walking the halls of my high school, trying to find my guidance counselor. There was a class – usually Spanish – that I barely attended but forgot to withdraw from; and the merciless teacher insisted on giving me an F. Unless I weaseled my way out of it, I wouldn’t graduate.

The dream itself wasn’t rooted in any literal truth (since I managed to graduate high school just fine, thank you), nor was it all that uncommon. According to a psychologist I know, lots of people have “high school dreams” or “college dreams”, and they tend to represent some general sense of unfinished business and/or a need to still accomplish something. Over time, they usually stop recurring... which mine did a few years ago when I finally realized that high school, for all its glory, both was and is a cruel joke.

Don’t get me wrong: I liked my high school. I learned some stuff, I made some friends, and – save the street gang executive who got shot and killed on the front steps in broad daylight – I don’t think there’s anywhere else I would have rather gone. But society tends to make the whole high school experience thing a much bigger deal than it is.

The expectations.

The pressure.

The societal norms you have to live up to.

I remember walking around the hallways (in real life, not the dream) with an innate sense that what I was doing and what was happening both to and around me would have an unequivocally permanent impact upon my entire being for the rest of my natural life.

As it turns out, I was wrong. A confessed dork back in high school (a truth my wife would unquestionably extend to present day as well), I was ranked slightly higher than the pocket protector/chess club nerds, yet far far below the realm of popular jocks. Nearly twenty years later, though, neither the academic nor the social stratification matters… and as a parent, that more than anything else is what I’m trying to figure out:

• How do I teach my kids to work hard but not perseverate?
• How do I tell them that what can seem like a big deal at the moment is really, truly nothing?
• And how do I get them to see that this whole grand theory of “high school” is just one of many many many phases of life?

Thankfully, I’ve still got six full years to figure it out.