High school tl;dr

Mine was a three-year high school: 10^th, 11^th and 12^th grades. There were ca. 530 students in my graduating class, and so over 1500 kids in the building on any given day. I doubt I knew more than a third of the kids in my class, maybe less. Students were tracked in math, so if you were on the advanced track (which started back in 7^th grade), you didn’t see many classmates in math class. And most kids only took one foreign language, so as a student in French, I didn’t see the kids who took Spanish or German. The only classes where students really mixed were health class and gym. My sophomore health class teacher was the basketball coach, who later that year impregnated one of my classmates and was sent down to teach elementary school. My sophomore gym coach was an old guy who was clearly demented and would fall asleep taking roll call.

I had a few good teachers: Judy Busse in English and journalism, Jackie Jacoby in physics and Jo Henderson in Biology II come immediately to mind. Other than that, my memories of high school are dominated by cross-country and track, and by the courtship of the girl that I started dating in my sophomore year and later married.

Thanks to Facebook, I’ve reconnected with a few high school classmates and others who were in other classes who I didn’t know back in the day. Honestly, when I graduated from high school, I was happy to move on to new experiences and new friends. Happy to leave behind the acne and the cliques: the populars, the hippies, the jocks, the geeks. It was three years of my 64 years on the planet. I’m not a sentimental person.

I’ve enjoyed the several high school reunions I’ve attended, but mostly because of the classmates who matured into reasonable adults. I’m not the same person I was in high school and I hope they aren’t either.