Some teenagers believe high school is going to be the most important time of their lives.
“These are your best years,” whispers the television in the living room.
Some choose to believe this, while others see high school as a transition between childhood and the adult world.
These teens often ask their peers: “What are you doing after high school?”
This frequently generates waves of apprehension that wash over even the bravest twelfth grader.
Grades 11 and 12 may be some of the most formative years of my life to date. This is because they are the rising action on the Freytag’s pyramid of my life’s plotline.
When I was in Grade 8, one of my friends was a firm believer that high school was going to be the apex of our lives. Even then, I firmly disagreed.
According to Webometrics, there are over 26, 355 higher education facilities in the world. I plan on going to at least some of them.
So while high school is important to me, it’s far from the end of my road.
The idea that the next year and a half will constitute my life’s apex and that it’s all downhill from there is a little alarming.
Doesn’t it get better?
Is there nothing more important out there than buying a grad dress or a grade on that final term paper?
There’s hard work ahead of me, and school is part of that. But Grade 11 and 12 will not define my life.
High school is important, and fun – new friends, first job, challenging classes.
What it is not is a parade of parties, a battleground for social standing, or a prison ruled with an iron fist and patrolled by despotic teachers.
This is a tarnished old stereotype fabricated by pop culture, and bad screenplays.
With three and half years of first-hand experience, high school, perhaps more than any other environment, is a microcosm of society at large. People from many walks of life, diverse cultural backgrounds, are all mixed together and thrown to the wolves with nothing but pencils, a laptop, and many devoted teachers to help them.
High schools function nothing like the old Hollywood lies suggest. High school is where people learn to work alongside others who are different from themselves, who hold different opinions. We learn to respect one another’s differences – much more than tolerance, we learn to accept.
Given the current global political climate, there are clearly more than a few adults who would benefit from a review of these high school lessons.
It’s not an easy road for everyone– there are plot twists and tragedies. But, like life, there’s discovery, growth, and an awakening. There is a determination to want to make our world somehow better than it is and the belief that it could be any one of us hanging out in the hallway who makes the next great leap forward in human history.
In asking a Grade 12 student the dreaded “what’s after high school?” query, be careful of the response. Yes, at 16, I can see that being the first veterinarian in space now seems a little unrealistic. But if my parents had told me that when I was nine, I would never have studied biology and astronomy, two subjects which I adore. There is nothing wrong with the simple response, “I don’t know yet.” It’s okay for 18-year-olds not to have their lives completely mapped out.
An adult who spends any amount of time in a high school knows that the teenage life is, ideally, equal parts social and academic development.
Adulthood and its responsibilities can be intimidating to teens.
For many of us, school is all we’ve ever known, and,.
Five years of high school – we get five years – and we need to make them count.
There’s a world of opportunity out there. All we have to do is grab it.
– By Marlowe Evans, a senior student at Thomas Haney
secondary and a member of the school's student council.