In My High School… We Were Terrible, Witty Teenagers

Blaine Larsen’s “In My High School” is one of my favorite songs.  It’s a soothing melody that reflects on what life and people were like in high school.

I wish I can say that the song brings back memories, but the song says nothing about juvenile delinquents who knew of no etiquette, decency or common sense that was prevalent in my high school.

One of the things people in my high school found hysterical was fire.  More than once the whole school would have to be evacuated because someone torched the trash.  After one particularly bad incident, a fire marshal lectured us on the obvious dangers of fire and that fire wasn’t something to be played with.  I don’t recall that making any difference.

Going to a private school, we were clever enough to be rudely respectful.  At every assembly, whenever the situation called for an applause, we would just keep on clapping until our hands got tired.

We of course played tricks on each other.  A common one was taking someone else’s backpack, emptying its contents, turning it inside out and putting the stuff back in.  One time a student told the teacher his bag was missing and the teacher prevented the class from leaving until it was found, only for the student to realize that the bag was right there all along, merely turned inside out.

Teachers, though, took the blunt of the abuse.  Those who couldn’t control the class were guaranteed spit balls, and if they really lacked control, students would unapologetically start throwing objects.

My religion teacher in my Sophomore year was an elderly man who had been teaching for multiple decades.  Lacking any conscience, we didn’t hesitate to take advantage of his advanced age.  He liked to use a podium to give his lectures, so someone in class often took the podium, hid it in a large garbage bucket and rolled the bucket into the hallway.   The teacher then went ambling around the school looking for his podium.

He also loved to talk about a commendable woman named Dorothy Day, a social activist.  Her sense of sacrifice had little meaning to teenage boys, who took the opportunity to play with the teacher’s memory.  Everyday, some student will ask him to speak about Dorothy Day, and he will inevitably go on a tangent to tell us the same stories he shared the day before.

For some reason, religion teachers had it the worst.  The teacher I had my Junior year was a man who, on the first day of class, talked about how God called him to move his entire family from Florida to New Jersey so he can inspire us with Jesus’ teachings.  Such honest but misguided confession was a sure-fire way to receive no respect from immature teenage boys attending an all boys Catholic school.  By the second day, he had no control.

This poor Italian man had the misfortune of looking exactly like Mario from the Nintendo game.  Alas, every day some student in class brought in a Gameboy and played Super Mario Brothers at full volume so the entire class can hear the BGM.

Nor did we accomplish anything meaningful in the class.  Whenever he gave homework, someone in the back will yell, “Not doin’ it”–and no one did.  Whenever he gave tests, we put our desks together and blatantly copied each others’ answers.

For the record, I never participated in any of the events above.  But I can’t claim the high moral ground either since I did nothing to prevent them from happening and found it all to be rather amusing.

With the passage of time, some maturity and some life perspective, I now know that how we were and what we did was wrong.  Anyone with a conscience would call the high school us the most horrible human beings for treating people who deserved our respect.

But the darnest thing about my memories from high school is that, yes, I now know that much of what we did was wrong, but I still think they were terribly funny.  To this day, I get a huge chuckle remembering the terrible things we did.

If you ask me how I haven’t matured since high school, I’ll probably say that I find what happened in high school to be still amusing.  Great thing about being a kid is that kids have boundless wittiness.  The problem is that kids have no conscience to temper it.  I’ve reached that point in my life where I’ll probably let the horseplay go on for a while, but I won’t sit idly by and have a teacher who taught for decades and a teacher who uprooted his family to be relieved of their duties during the middle of the school year.

I guess that’s progress.