Life after high school
I recently went to parents’ night at our local high school in Princeton, New Jersey. The way these evenings work is that parents walk through their children’s schedule, going from classroom to classroom. There we sit in remarkably uncomfortable chairs for a 15-minute introduction to the teacher and the course he or she teaches.
It’s been a very long time since I’ve been in a high school, and memories flooded over me.
As I shuffled down the halls looking at the posters advertising the next dance, a homecoming pep rally and tryouts for the spring musical, I was transported back 40 years to when I walked through high school halls in a blue-collar neighborhood on Long Island. I realize that youth culture has changed dramatically over these years. But the beige linoleum floors, the tiled state-hospital-like walls, the wide stairwells that beg for someone to slap down an armful of books—they are all the same. I walked past one locker that was dented—and prayed for the nerd whose head had been pushed into it. And don’t even get me started on the bathrooms. Have the graffiti artists developed no creativity after so many years?
