High School and real life

As of today, Robertson High School seniors have only 17 schools days left on the calendar. Though time seems to be passing slower than ever before, we will be graduates in no time.

I’ve often heard people say that high school, especially senior year, flew by quicker than they could’ve imagined. I’m actually almost positive I’ll find myself saying something similar someday in the not-so-distant future. I don’t really believe that these four years have flown by, but I’m pretty sure that’s how I’ll choose to express my surprise at actually being done with high school, at never having to go back.

What has high school been like? It’s hard to say. So much has happened. So much has been learned, and so much of what we thought we knew has been tested and has failed. I’m not even going to mention the curriculum in this column; I am talking about the things we learned about ourselves. We’ve had four years worth of life lessons, and yet I still feel completely unprepared to face real life.

And that’s how we refer to life outside of high school: real life. For some of us, high school and “real life” are directly connected. These are people who’ve already started to live real life while in high school, people who’ve already decided to get married, or begun to raise children. These are people who’ve had to learn a lot of life lessons earlier than most of us.

But what about the rest of us? Have the things we’ve learned about life meant nothing, simply because we’re in high school? I understand that high school students have a fairly well earned reputation of exaggerating situations, or blowing them out of proportion. But how much of our experiences can be dismissed as “high school drama” and how much of them really matter? In the last four years, we’ve felt love, confusion, anger, heartbreak – you name it. And that’s life. Who’s to say it wasn’t real?

Once in while, I hear adults discussing things that happened to them in high school, and it scares me half to death. What will I remember of my high school experience? As a senior with less than two months left, I feel a strange nostalgia for everything that has happened, even times I didn’t enjoy when they took place. Is this how I’m always going to look back on high school?

Jazzmine Freedom , a Robertson High School senior, is an intern with the Las Vegas Optic.