High School: Our Home and Prison

Exactly 3 months and 9 years ago, I graduated from an exclusive private and sectarian (meaning catholic religious) school for women, and in celebration, I threw my worn-out pink planner in the air, in place of my missing graduation hat (as we didn’t have one), and screamed in absolute jubilee: “I am free! It’s over!”

What could I have been lamenting upon my graduation, I wondered? Was it the tiresome days of high school where we dragged our feet to school after lacking in hours of sleep, or was it the dream of facing another clique of fresh-faced girls who believed that they were the monarchs of the school?

In hindsight, I would hypothesize that maybe it was merely the combination of the feelings of escape from an environment that served both as a home and prison, as well as experiencing an anxiety of change, coupled with the unmistakable hormones of teenage spirit.

We spend more hours in school than we do in our own homes, which is why teachers, unappreciated as they are, bear the brunt and responsibility of rearing us as well as educating us even if they are not related to us by blood.

As we now tackle Social Learning Theory in my education classes, I am faced with a reality that most of the modelling and mentoring might have been taken from my school more than my own home.

It is quite a significant choice for parents to pick a school for their children to grow into. Taking the tuition fees aside, the parents would choose a school by weighing out and balancing prestige, quality of education, reputation, and values to be learned, while thinking of the ideal adult they want their child to become. After we graduate, we do become less of our parents and more of what the school molded us to be.

Growing up, my school instilled in us the graces of a young lady, and as an exclusive school for girls, we were taught skills that were decidedly feminine in nature. All our teachers were female, and there was even a point at high school where more than 50% of the girls had the same haircut.

It sometimes felt like a prison because the rules and procedures were too rigid. We had to be in a uniform, behave a certain way, stay inside a couple of hours, stay out a couple of hours, do tasks and do not complain—a cycle which repeats every single day for 13 years.

But it was a home, a home with new parents yearly. Parents who taught us different things, coddled us and disciplined us, and we had hundreds of siblings who we fight with, share stories with, eat with, and collaborate with.

We learned and adapted not from the lessons being taught, but more on the subtle cues coming from the practice of the teachers we admire. There was an English teacher whose accent we emulated for fun, and as such, we didn’t even notice that her hand gestures and her way of walking found their way into our own behaviors.

Our classmates, even as most of them seem to be love and hate relationships, were the major sources of influence.  When one classmate gets socially rewarded from being funny, we learn from her humor, and soon after, everyone is laughing at essentially the same joke. The same way as when a classmate becomes socially excluded after being a teacher’s pet, everyone makes sure to avoid going to a teacher any more than is necessary.

This is probably one of the reasons why teenagers all over the world are experiencing the same sort of dilemma with and in school. It is someplace we came to love and feel comfortable in, but it is also a place we seek to escape from.

Children are very impressionable. No matter what the teenager says, and no matter how “adult” they feel during adolescence, science would say that we are children/minors up until our prefrontal cortex is fully formed, and we start using that instead of our amygdala for decision making. And according to science, we only reach this point after 21 years of age, and in some instances, even 23!

High school is the cusp of social learning, and sometimes it burns out the already hormonally-haywired brain of the teen. It is during this stage that we take in and process large amounts of data that causes us to continually change our own make-up so that we could blend in and please everyone.

Thinking about it this way, it does seem overwhelming for a teen, don’t you think?

The school was our home, and as teachers we must always remember what we went through when we were there as students. We will always be kept on our toes, because most of the time, it shall not be our words that would stick, but it is us that gets imprinted in these children as they evolve and grow.