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04 February 2008
Your Highschool→[More:]Where did you guys attend school? (Just clicked on my school website yesterday and was curious to know about every one else's here.)
West Allis Central High School. Notable mainly for a few Olympic gold medalist speed skaters and the legendary counter-plan of doom during the '96 debate season. GO BULLDOGS!
A small, suburban high school (now years 7-13, the middle school merged just a few years ago). Generally thought to be one of the not-so-good schools of the area, however my graduating class (~100 students) managed to turn out about 10 PhDs and a Rhodes Scholar.
Public high school in the northern suburbs of Atlanta, with about 1600 students total. Fairly affluent neighborhood, pretty good school (high test scores, decent number of AP classes). Not too many cliques or too much nastiness, at least that I was aware of. I liked it.
Lyneham High School for years 7 and 8, the largest high school (7-10) in the city at the time with 1200 students and integrated gifted and special ed streams. Lots of sporty types, scholarship kids from the nearby Australian Institute of Sport. My 5th grade teacher is now the principal.
Wynnum State High School for year 10 (different state, different school system - I got to skip year 9). Second-largest public high school (8-12) in the city with 1900 students. A rugby league feeder school so again with the sporty types, and near the water so lots of surfers. Pretty rough. I left after grade 10 as I was wasting my time.
A small-town county high school in west Georgia, late 70s-early 80s. About 1000 kids I think, grades 8 - 12. Overall not a bad school, though there were some rough kids around. During one of my years there, it had the highest teen pregnancy rate in the country! Yay, bible belt kids.
Enterprise High School is located in the Northern California city of Redding. Enterprise High School opened its doors in 1954. Since that time, Enterprise has been producing the informed citizenry that has made Redding the wonderful place to live that it is today; a city with a pleasant present, an interesting and bucolic past, and a strong vision of the future and Redding's place in it.
Strange that pretty much everyone I know got the hell out of town as soon as we graduated.
State (public to those across the Atlantic) comprehensive school, about 1100 pupils, in the UK. I hated it for the first four years (not the education so much as the bullying), then it got better towards the end. A pretty ordinary school with no major problems to speak of.
9th & 10th grade, prep school in Massachusetts. Kicked out for suspicion - suspicion, mind you - of smoking marijuana on a regular basis and also for forging sports excuses. Alas, nobody has three periods a month and they figured it out.
11th grade, exclusive and obnoxious private girls school in South Carolina. Kicked out for cutting school despite the fact that I was getting straight As - the headmistress was not amused by my comment that there was no point in attending five days a week when one can get As by attending three.
12th grade, strange "American" boarding school in Spain. Dropped out on eve of being kicked out for embezzling money from student council - money was taken as fines from boarding students whose rooms were not clean; money was returned to those same students; took houseparents 8 months to figure out why no one cared about getting fined when their rooms were messy. Not too bright, houseparents!
Went to college on the strength of my SATs and being a National Merit Scholar finalist. Finally got a GED so I could transfer to the University of Colorado for a year. Never looked back. High school is stupid.
the headmistress was not amused by my comment that there was no point in attending five days a week when one can get As by attending three.
I was in a bizarre conversation yesterday in which two university students were complaining about high-school and college students who don't pay attention in class and then get As anyway, because it's "the height of arrogance" to ignore the teacher.
No comment was made on whether teachers who force bright students to sit through non-compelling classes that don't contribute to their understanding of the material were also displaying a wee bit of arrogance.
Parkfield Cedars Grammar School for Girls. It was one of the old-style State grammar schools that have, apart from a tiny handful, now been replaced by Comprehensive Schools.
I consider myself very, very lucky to have gone to that school, even though I was bullied in the last couple of years and left as soon as I could. I got a fantastic education, although I didn't realise my full potential, due to external influences. It's only now in later years that I can appreciate what a good grounding in many, many subjects that school gave me.
Morristown High in NJ. Home of the Fighting Colonials. The most famous alum are Craig Newmark (Craig's List) and Gene Shallit.
I kept such a low profile in High School that there was nothing to put in my year book blurb. I did the very minimum that I needed to graduate, joined no clubs, no sports, no activities and didn't attend a single school sponsored anything. I didn't even eat in the cafeteria once in four years. I'm not sure that my adviser even knew who I was.
syntax: my dad's yearbook from when he was a senior at Huntington Beach High in 1965 has a section for Marina High - it had only been around for a couple of years and didn't have its own yearbook yet. I pored over that yearbook for hours.
occhiblu and mgl: Dropping out of high school was one of the best decisions I ever made, one I've never regretted for a minute. School was stiflingly boring.
though I sometimes skipped the first 3 parts. I was an obnixous high school kid.
My claim to high school fame is having a picture of me sleeping during a class outside becoming a two page spread. It's good to know people on the yearbook staff.
syntax - my mum went to Westminster High School in the 1950s. She got married at 16 and pregnant at 17. They kicked her out when she started showing because she "was a bad influence" on the other kids.
My best friend dated an Enterprise kid, and I thought that was sooo rebellious.
My parents and grandparents still live there, so I go back every two years or so. Yeah, there's really nothing to recommend it, besides the outdoor recreation, and the easy and reliable access to Humboldt County weed.
Homer High School in Homer, Alaska. About 500 students total and 120 in my graduating class - most of whom had gone to school with me since kindergarten.
Hugo Treffner Grammar School, generally considered an "elite" school (only grades 10-12, quite picky about admission, majority of the students go straight to university). The schoolhouse was badly damaged in a fire in my first year, so we got to spend the next two years walking between different old buildings around the old town centre, while our schoolhouse was being rebuilt. I had Math classes in an old anatomical theatre, English in a meeting room in the city hall, and gym classes in a gym built into an old church in the Soviet era. Man, those were the days...
Other than the architectural excursions, high school was boring as hell. I was sloppy with my homework, wrote essays that I was supposed to have written at home, in class right before they were due, generally spent maybe fifteen minutes studying for a test (quite often right before the test), played cards in the back row, yet still got almost straight As and got the best average results in national exams in my school that year (which I didn't even care about at the time).
Although there were a few memorable personalities in the teaching staff (like my physics teacher who came to class only to hand us a bunch of assignments, and then went outside to smoke and have a drink), I mostly hated them. The only ones I really liked were my math teacher (a bright young man with a great sense of humour; he would let us play Bridge in class as long as we didn't have any problems keeping up with others) and my last Literature teacher. She - unlike the other teachers - actually liked my sense of humour and the twisted stuff I wrote. She was also the only teacher to set me as an example to my classmates: one time, she told them that if they wanted to get a good grade for their national exam essay, they really should not write like me.
I went to the original Bolingbrook High School which had few windows and a rough reputation; among its features were not much of anything except color-coded locker navigation and a furry green chair that friends and I rescued from the trash compactor. Our mayor refused to put lights on the football field.
Well after I graduated, the building was turned into a middle school and the new high school became the first Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certified school in Illinois. Among its new features are natural light, native grasses and a system that collects and reuses condensation off the air conditioning units. Partly because of my mother, there are now lights on the football field.
Centennial Regional HS. It was a pretty good school when I went there, the principal was an ex-CFL guy who wouldn't tolerate much BS in his school. It went downhill after he retired. Factoid: Elisha Cuthbert (Jack's daughter on 24) went to the same school, but she was a few grades behind (below?) me.
She was also in Popular Mechanics For Kids with Jay Baruchel, who was in Undeclared with Charlie Hunnam, who was in Queer As Folk with Aiden Gillen, who was in Shanghai Knights with Jackie Chan. Six degrees of Jackie Chan!
Good ole BHS -- now with its own TV show! (We tried for four years to get them to reopen the student radio station, even if only at a few watts. The bastards.)
Red Bank Regional High School, a union of three towns: Red Bank (my hometown), Little Silver, and Shrewsbury. I wasn't anyone in high school, more under the radar than anything else.
Sickles, rural Hillsborough county, for my first year
And even though I graduated from Blake, I didn't step foot in the building my senior year. I was done with high school by that point. But luckily they let me take all my classes at community college and use those credits towards graduation.