Downright Wrong Lessons I Learned In High School

Not my high school (Wikipedia)

High school was a magical time for me. Seventh grade bullies turned out to be losers, geeks like me found friends, and many of us had our first real shot at shaping our futures with vocational classes, the arts, and college-level electives. For the first time ever, I enjoyed how old I was. I had enough freedom to make my own schedule, learn what I wanted to learn, and do what I wanted to do.

During this relatively euphoric and glorious period, I learned many important life lessons. Unfortunately, some of them turned out to be completely, totally, miserably wrong. Here's a sampling of the ones I had to learn over again.


More Is Better!

Shawshank Redemption via Kloipy

Back when I knew everything, I knew nothing about nuance. Less was less, and more was more. With this sort of beautifully simplistic thinking, I was certain that if a tactic worked, then even more of that tactic would surely work better. The most galling display of this wisdom of mine reared its head whenever I made morning announcements. Having spent many years acting and developing a full-throated "stage voice" of which I was quite proud, I deemed it important to unleash this beast through the PA system onto the ears of 2,000 half-awake students and faculty in the mornings to make them pay attention. Looking back, I imagine a few people still remember my announcements, but rather for the earaches I gave them instead of the messages.

Popularity Contests are Immature!

Napoleon Dynamite (source)

High school introduced me to the awesome world of responsibility, merit, and general grownup-edness. Imagine my surprise, then, to see Homecoming court and student government elections still amounting to little more than popularity and likability elections. What were we in? Middle school??

Certain that the likability factor was just a temporary holdover from puberty, I ran for student government and applied for jobs around town based purely on my merit and abilities. Lo and behold, I succeeded in getting both, thus proving my conviction that hard skills were the sole reason to bestow a position upon someone in the adult world!

Okay, in retrospect, my conviction wasn't really "proved". No one ran against me for class VP, and after local music studios and radio stations pushed my job-seeking tail out the door, I was finally hired to lug tables up flights of stairs, shoulder-to-shoulder with guys who mooned each other from the tops of buildings and taped each other to walls when work was slow. I was also considered my interviewer's "last present" because he wasn't well-liked and had decided to quit before my first day. So much for that conviction of mine. I was halfway through college before I finally bought into the importance of personality and networking in elections and the hiring process.

Rules Are For Everyone Else!

Office Space via IMCDB

Getting in the good graces of faculty and staff worked wonders for me getting around rules in high school. I got security codes, door keys, preferred parking, use of school vehicles, and equipment that no one wanted. They never said a word to me about the cell phones I wore either. Of course, I appreciated the trust they placed in me and took my responsibilities seriously, but my ego was so massive that I walked out of that school thinking that rules didn't really apply to me.

Har har har, what a joke. It turned out that real world rules are nothing like the ones in high school. Many high school policies exist as a protection blanket against juvenile wrongdoers. Real world rules govern the money, safety, and fairness of adults, so they're a touch more serious.  They don't bend for certain people like I'd hoped and thought; they just bend for certain situations.

High School Seniors Are Adults Too, Just Younger!

Animal House

Yeah, right. In true "you don't know what you don't know" fashion, I was sure I had the world on a string once I left school, with a steady stream of big boy decision-making waiting anxiously in my near future. Turns out, what I didn't know while strutting down the football field in my mortarboard was that I hadn't even begun to make all my stupid mistakes on the way to adulthood. But, how is an 18-year-old who's never been exposed to love, vices, or living on his own supposed to know that? Answer: college.

Like many folks, the most liberal I ever was was in college. Beer? Girls? Hope? Bring it! While I don't regret any of the stuff I did in college, I learned a lot of hard lessons (thank you Vegas and summer stock theatre) that helped me discover just how not grown-up I actually was.

There's Only One Correct Answer!

I freak out like this too. (source)

Here's one I got right! Well, "right" as long as I was talking about something I actually knew, like arithmetic or colors.  In high school, I failed to consider just about everything around me, and never picked up on the fact that I sat in different chairs, played different musical instruments, and used different computers and pens that flew in the face of my one-answer-to-every-question view of the world.

I've given up searching for the ultimate solution to everything. Since there's no real way for me to completely stamp out my ignorance of the world around me, I'll keep on living my life according to the best lessons I've learned.  I'll also try to not freak out next time I find out I'm wrong again, which I bet will happen by sundown.