Despite the fact that I am a fully-qualified High School graduate with more than two decades of actual post-high school life experience, the vast, shadowy educational conspiracy has never asked me to speak at a graduation. They’re afraid of what I might say and they were right to fear. Given a microphone and a room full of eager young adults dressed like supreme court justices in funny hats, I’d feel honor-bound tell them the truth.
You know how in High School “they” always tell you that they’re preparing you for life. The truth is … they’re absolutely right. If high school was a TV series, then adult life would be the big-screen adaption of the same material. The stakes are higher, the explosions are louder, and the guys are paunchier and balder. Disappointingly, not much else changes.
Really.
I have to be honest and tell you that when I think back to high school, there are a lot of missing pages in my mental photo album if you know what I mean. These include Freshman English, Sophomore English, and all of History, Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Algebra. To the best of my recollection Thomas Edison wrote the Declaration of Independence one afternoon during a visit to the Galapagos Islands when an apple fell on his head and he came up with the famous E=mc2 equation.
It’s also possible that I’ve forgotten all that because my brain was too busy making back-ups of my most embarrassing moments so that there will always copies to replay in case I start to feel self-confidence. Some of the things that top my brain’s self-inflicted-pain play list include dropping a lunch tray in a crowded cafeteria, being turned down for the Senior Prom, everything that happened in Freshman PE, and actually attending the Sadie Hawkins dance.
My fundamental High School problem was that I had all of the natural grace of a three-legged duck. When we ran laps in the gym, I tripped over the lines painted on the hardwood. My free-throw average was a theoretical number similar to that used by physicists to measure sub-atomic particles. My efforts on the chin-up bar resembled the frantic gyrations of a worm wriggling at the end of a hook.
The gym was my least favorite place in school. It was also the location of the various school dances. Without thinking it through, I attended these events and actually tried to dance.
This was a problem because my sense of rhythm compared favorably to many species of trees and even a few of the woodier members of the hedge family. Compared to actual animals — especially other humans — I was considered a danger to myself and others. When I attended, they weren’t so much “dances” as “flails”.
Yet, as I said, High School really does prepare you for life. These early, unpleasant experiences taught me the importance of avoiding gymnasiums and dance halls.
High School also taught me to be careful in choosing my friends. In my Senior year I fell in with a bad crowd and became a Student Body Officer. Not one of the cool officers like President, though. I was the Parliamentarian; the guy who got to make sure all of the meetings were run by the rules and followed the published agenda. This is not, as it turns out, a chick magnet. No one has ever successfully started a relationship with the phrase, “Hey beautiful, can I make a Parliamentary Inquiry? Or do would you rather call a Point of Privilege?”
Interestingly, though, being Parliamentarian did prepare me for a career in Middle Management.
On the plus side, High School relationships taught me a lot about adult relationships. Most high school relationships end in acrimony and bitterness. The same goes for a lot of adult relationships. The only difference is that with adults, the anger is likely to be expressed with the assistance of an attorney and settled in court.
That’s not to say that High School relationships aren’t conducted without the aid of outsiders. An awful lot of romances begin as whisper campaigns that would be the envy of any guerrilla marketer.
Imagine that girl A is interested in boy B. Instead of making her interests known, she’ll enlist the aid of girl C who will draft girls D and E to take a note to boy F to pass to boy B to ask if he thinks that girl A is ugly. The more insecure the girl, the more links in the chain between her and the boy. A similar theory can be found in the workings of the United Nations.
In high school, a note reading “Janice thinks you’re totally hot and wants to make out with you” is passed through the sweaty hands of teenagers. In the UN, a resolution reading “Oligarcistan thinks your country is totally powerful and wants to make peace with you” is passed through the courier bags of diplomats.
By the time the boy gets around to thinking about taking the girl out, the entire student body has gotten involved and is heavily invested in the outcome and he doesn’t dare decline. Again, the same pressure applies in international relations.
The final, and most useful, thing I learned in High School was how to entertain myself. Every day I was subjected to approximately seventy-five hours of lectures on topics that held as much interest for me as an engineering journal holds for a cat. Each period was a race to see whether my brain or backside would go numb first. Survival dictated that I find ways to keep my mind active and I developed a very rich fantasy life. Now that I’m an grown-up in a job which administers large doses of meetings at regular intervals, I regularly fall back on those skills.
So, to the graduates I say, “High school does prepare you for life. I’m sorry. I’m so very, very sorry.”
