This week marks the one-year anniversary of my completion of high school. A year ago this week I was young and foolish; counting down my year level’s final days, relaxing in the spring sun, doing sudoku during private study... I can vividly recall brazenly ignoring my study commitments, yet knuckling down in order to write bad sexual innuendo for our final assembly.
Because Year 12 is all about priorities, people.
I can now see that it was a week of contradictions, really; filled with both sadness and joy, we spent half our time nostalgic about the past and half our time giddily excited for the future.
The Final Week rounded out what was a landmark year for me and my peers. It was the year we realized that teachers are people too, bless their little cotton socks. It was the year we came to care about what we were studying (a little bit... perhaps... maybe.). It was the year we realized just how important friends and family can be and how school isn't so bad after all and how music is really, really good and how big the world is and how small we are and how short life is and how intense the existence/non-existence of God is and how getting along with people is a really worthwhile goal and how being yourself is super important and how we have the rest of our lives ahead of us and how brothers and sisters are actually pretty awesome and how life is what you make it and how, as it turns out, we don't know everything and how that's okay.
It was the year that marked the end of a major stage of our lives and the beginning of a new one. And I must say, there's really nothing like the appearance of a large, weed killer-generated depiction of a penis on the school's front lawn to celebrate that transition.
I now look back on those heady days with fondness and more than a little sentimentality. As I type this with my withered, arthritic fingers, drawing my musty woolen rug about my hunched shoulders, I take a tentative sip of Camomile tea and consider the fate of today's "whippersnappers", what with their rock'n'roll music and the interweb and the drugs and whathaveyou. As my thoughts turn to my Year 12 friends who will hear the 3:26pm bell for the final time next week, I take stock of the past 365 days and wonder what the next year has in store for us all.
Having experienced a pretty varied year on The Outside - traveling overseas, moving to the Big Smoke, living in a share-house, working a 9 til 5, eating a lot of cheese and pasta - I can confirm that which was always foretold: I miss school.
I love my life at the moment and I'm extremely glad that I deferred tertiary study and moved out on my own. But that soft, melancholic cloud drops by now and again to remind me that I shan't be going back to the time when you could see your friends at least five days a week, you had a supportive network of people who were looking after you, and you had a comprehensive, imposed schedule to complain about. The irony is worthy of a mention in a Unit 3/4 English text response; while I no longer have to wear a uniform, I no longer get to enjoy the novelty of out-of-uniform days.
Deep.
It's all very Joni Mitchell, really: "Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's gone?"
And it's that bittersweet message I'd like to pass on to today's secondary school students, from the adorable little Year Sevens to the graduating classes of 2008: enjoy it while you can. Though I don't subscribe to the "best years of your life" theory, I do certainly believe that you have it pretty good at school. Or, at the very least, you can have it really good if you make the effort, learn to get along with your peers and realize that you're not a starving child in Africa or living under occupation in Palestine. There seems to be an engrained tendency in all of us to moan about school, to count down the days until the holidays and to be thankful for the CRT teacher who facilitates bludging. Yes, our schools - particularly our public schools - could do with improved facilities, a revised curriculum and a decrease in bullying, but there's still something inspiring about the existence of institutions that are specifically aimed at bringing together boys and girls from all across the community and educating them about life. I now realize that you're almost constantly learning things at school, both inside and outside a classroom. You learn when sitting in front of your teachers, but you also learn when playing basketball with your friends or when bitching about your enemies. Your body grows hair in weird places and your worldview blows up and outwards at the same time as your friends grow hair in weird places and have their worldviews blown up and outwards.
It's an extremely cool time in your life and it doesn't get the credit it deserves. Or, if it does, it comes too late.
In her 2000 AM smash hit Graduation (Friends Forever), Vitamin C sings: "And as our lives change, come whatever, we will still be friends forever...."
Now, I thought that sounded about right for me a year ago. I'll always keep in touch with my friends, surely; ain't nothin' gonna keep me from my crew.
Man.
The belief that my core group of friends in high school would always be my core group of friends and that although our lives would change, we would still be 4eva frenz "come whatever" has been (not surprisingly) proved naive. I still keep in contact with many of my high school friends and miss them and love them, but there is an overwhelming sense that our best days are behind us. As we move on through life, we’re meeting new people and making new friends, our former tightly-knit bonds turning into a series of ‘catch-ups’ and Facebook wall-posts.
And that's okay. Times change, circumstances change, sands through the hourglass, etc; I just think it's important to remember and be thankful for The Days Of The Old Schoolyard. They were great, really.
So - to the class of 2008: have fun during your last days of high school. Dress up in stupid clothes, squirt those stinkin' Year 8 kids with water guns, organize a hearse to be driven through the school, give out lollies, go out on the town, sign each other’s uniforms, play hardcore emo punk metal over the loudspeakers, spray Silly String all over the classrooms; whatever.
Just also remember to tell your teachers and your friends how you feel about them, thank those who have helped you, reflect on your kindergarten, primary and high school years and take the best memories with you. You'll regret it if you don't.
Also, don't do the penis thing. You'll probably regret that, too.
Email a friend