High School: The Unrated Version

After revisiting my old high school today, a year after my own graduation, I feel compelled to reflect on my high school experience once again.
Like plenty of college students, I haven’t had a lot of time to think about what high school meant to me since I started college. Running off to the Big City of Manhattan, I didn’t look back. Reentering campus today, I looked around in awe and thought – has it really only been a year since I was a student here? However, as soon as the bell rang (dreaded, hateful sound) and kids burst out from rooms all around me, I had to acknowledge the truth. At the high school I had happily forgotten, I didn’t just recognize a few faces. I recognized nearly all of them. For better or worse, the life I had created for myself in New York was briefly forgotten, and I was, once more, a high school senior.
Immediately, I was frustrated at the effects being back in high school had on my psyche. I stuttered when talking to the Spanish teacher that I was convinced held resentment towards me for not taking his honors seminar in my senior year (little did he know, it was my parents who prevented this; I was “taking on too much” in an already busy year). I felt awkward walking around during the passing period, not sure whether to make eye contact with the students who looked familiar to me. My behavior was a mixture of newly bred confidence – evidence of my current life – and shyness, as the self-consciousness which had plagued me “back in the day” returned with a vengeance.
Yet at the same time, being at high school humbled my University-student-I-have-everything-going-for-me attitude. After getting swept up and blown away by the magnitude of New York, I had, without realizing it, developed a disdain for my high school which was not completely unwarranted, but greatly blown out of proportion. Today, I looked around and didn’t see the ignorant, shallow children I had pictured. I saw intelligent and capable human beings with incredible potential, in the midst of an exciting and unique part of their lives. Not unlike my college peers I realized that my teachers, too, had been kind and thoughtful individuals rather than embodiments of a mediocre public education.
After reading an issue of the newspaper I had worked on in high school, I was pleasantly surprised at the insightfulness of the articles (complimented by a lack of pretentiousness found in New York schools or magazines).
Overall, I found that I could be impressed by things going on in my little old suburban town. Not only do I feel a small surge of warmth come over me when I think about my visit (although at the time, I was bursting to leave the campus – I experienced a slight “sensory overload” at seeing so much of my past at once), but I am once again reminded that I can find intellect, enjoyment, and meaning in interactions that don’t involve – well, worldly college students and their professors. High school wasn’t just a roadbump on the way to better things. Of course it was crucial to how I developed as a human being. Hashem kept me there for four years!