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.

Candy and Strangers

Taking candy from strangers isn't a bad thing.

In fact, once someone's old enough to realize that subsequently getting in a big white van is dangerous even if it's headed to church, taking things from strangers almost becomes a social expectation. After all, those pink boxes of Christmas donuts and chocolate left anonymously in the office aren't going to eat themselves!

High school politics and fundraising utterly depend on folks taking candy from strangers. The relentless battery of lollipops dished out during these popularity contests for class president represent a much tastier approach to locking in votes than going around kissing illegitimate babies and promising to hire Deadmau5 for a residency in the cafeteria. (Full disclosure: I myself won a landslide election for class VP out of a barrage of opponents numbering exactly zero.) Without candy sales, how could the marching band afford to go pummel the morale out of lesser schools at competitions? How would the Shakespeare club raise money to perform at festivals if it weren't for bake sales? Put on shows or something?

This whole anti-social candy doctrine many kids learn is part of a house of cards just waiting to come crashing down on ol' Saint Nick and the tooth fairy. As far as I was concerned as a young Lego-eater, we were expected to speak when spoken to and eat what us country folk called a "polite bite" whenever someone kindly offered up food. We went out crusading in itchy yet conversation-inducing costumes on Halloween, totally banking on getting treats instead of tricks at each house before returning home to brutalize our stomaches and tease out diabetes at night's end. We would go out to meet the ice cream men, and as long as they could speak English good, they were okay in our book.

If at seven years old I had been told to not take candy from strangers, then been kicked out my front door to go sell boxes of Girl Scout cookies to them, I'd have had a conniption over the horrific logic. Really? I could talk to strangers to sell them candy, but couldn't take any from them? That hypocritical stance would be like saying China could sell high-tech products into the US, but couldn't get any in return (oh wait, that's real). I'd also be really embarrassed and mad at the person who decided to smuggle little Jesse into Girl Scouts in the first place.

The fact is, taking candy from strangers and striking up small conversations as we grew up taught many of us to be more normal than anything. Maybe a little fatter. Heck, for all I know, those interactions might be the only thing standing between me and tin foil hats right now. All in all, there's little reason to be scared about taking candy from a stranger, as long as that stranger isn't one of those rampant weirdos that steals kids.