Odds are, if you’re reading this post, high school is coming to an end for you. You probably have mixed feelings about this, and one of those feelings (hopefully the most prominent one) is probably excitement. After 3 or 4 years, I’m sure you’ve had more than enough of the routine.
When you’re in this sort of mindset, it’s easy to take some of the integral components of the high school experience for granted. Two years removed from it all, I’m finding myself missing a few of the things I didn’t think much about at the time.
I should preface these by saying that I don’t wish that any of these characters/things followed me to college – in fact, I’m probably remembering them so fondly simply because I don’t come into contact with them anymore. But they are things that, looking back, feel totally essential in that context. Here are a few of those things.
Class Clowns
In college, at least at Tufts, there are no more class clowns. Nobody’s tense or cutthroat in class, but people take their studies and discussions seriously and nobody is too interested in disrupting the lectures. That’s not to say there isn’t humor – many of my professors have been able to get the whole class to laugh heartily and frequently – but you’re enjoying the wittiness of a professional rather than the antics of some dingus. It’s a very different sort of experience. In high school, some people just didn’t care. And sometimes it was great to be around those people. Sometimes you could learn a thing or two from them.
Subs
With a few exceptions, having a sub in high school meant doing no work for that class period. In college, if a professor can’t make a lecture, class is either cancelled or a TA fills in for them. In either case, you don’t get the sort of chaos that ensues in a high school setting. You don’t get the tacit boycotts of the worksheet your teacher left for your class – even though it would probably only take about five minutes to get through – and you don’t get kids swapping names during attendance either (that last one might be more of a middle school tactic). Maybe you get to watch a movie, but it’ll be something interesting you would’ve watched anyway, not some crap like this that pretty much invites you and your classmates to throw paper balls at each other for the whole class.
Shitty Cafeteria Food
This one is probably a textbook case of romanticizing the past just because it’s in the past, and I definitely wouldn’t trade Tufts’ dining hall food for soggy pizza and mystery meat. But there was a certain charm to the lunch food that was served up in my school’s cafeteria. Part of that charm was the fact that each meal was $2.50. Another part of it was that, much like with McDonald’s or Taco Bell, being aware that the food is disgusting doesn’t necessarily make it any less delicious. The most popular item was the made-to-order wrap. In the fashion of Chipotle, you would start with a tortilla and then ask the person behind the counter to fill it with whatever combination of available foodstuffs you wanted. My go-to combo was “chicken” and “beef” with cheese and BBQ sauce (lettuce and tomato were options, but I wasn’t interested). The beef came in flakes of uniform thickness and seemed to be perforated. It looked as if they were sliced from a sheet of meat that was originally packaged around a giant paper towel roll. In case that description doesn’t do anything for you, picture this, but much bigger and with beef instead of paper:
I have no way of confirming that that’s actually how it was packaged, but if I saw a big beef-roll in the back of that cafeteria, I wouldn’t be surprised.
I usually just brought lunch to school, so when I got one of these wraps with some remarkably mediocre fries, it was a real treat. I usually got two meals because I would get so excited about the first one that I’d wolf it down without enjoying the subtle complexity of suspect flavors.
Again, I’m not looking to get these things back. I’d be pretty frustrated if there was a kid who yelled dumb stuff in the middle of a college lecture all the time, and pretty disgusted if Tufts Dining started serving their steaks in weird little flakes. I’m just saying that if these are things you’re finding yourself fed up with, take a second to appreciate them before you leave high school. You might miss them.