My friend and neighbor is struggling with the changes in her life and that of her children's as they progress through school. Her eldest, a very bright, talented and athletically gifted young man, entered our local public high school this year. Apparently things have not been going well with his academic schedule. He has experienced a number of other glitches in the system. He is now part of an enormous institution – several times the size of the middle school from which he graduated in June.
Knowing my own daughters strengths and needs, I am already thinking about high school options for her. I have begun reading the websites of well-known private boarding schools dotted across the country, although largely clustered along the East coast. While reading these presentations, I long for the opportunity to "re-do" high school.
I attended a private all-girls day school for my first two years of secondary education. After near-nervous breakdowns from stress and unhappiness, my parents pulled me out and I had to find another. I browsed glossy catalogs from day schools in the Philadelphia area. Each seemed to trump the next with its campus acreage, volumes in the libraries, average SAT scores, and computers available on campus.
Through my research, I became enamored with the offerings of a seemingly "hippie" yet exclusively-priced Friends school approximate to the Main Line. A Friends school is one that follows in Quaker traditions. To an outsider, the style and methodology of education at a Friends school might seem permissive. To my weary-of-Catholic-school teen eyes, it seemed perfect. My parents conferenced and decided that with two years before college, the cost was too great for our family budget. I ended up at the local public school. It worked out ok, but I still think I missed out on…something.
When I began my freshman year at Northwestern, I noted a number of classmates who, according to the Freshman Face Book [a getting-to-know-you type of publication] were graduates from "name brand" private high schools: Choate. Andover. Exeter. St. Andrews. I was secretly jealous.
My dorm was separated by gender per suite. The suite adjacent to mine (much to my parents horror) housed young men. One of these guys, a consummate preppie, (Deerfield Academy) and I ended up having a strangely intimate yet secretive relationship.
A contemporary view of a young man and woman being part-time friends usually implies casual sex. That was not what created the bond between Kurt and me. We got high together. He supplied the weed, bong(s), pipes, and beer. I only had to offer the apparently-amusing juxtaposition of girlish naïveté and urbane attitude.
Often his roommate, Matt, a farmer's son from western Michigan, would join us in our mind-numbing activities. There was a lot of shared laughter, usually at each others' expense. Occasionally, we'd engage in pranks with other dorm mates. But we never ate together in dining hall, shared classes, or attended the same social events. To this day, I am not certain if we shunned each others' company around campus to keep our drug use a secret or if the drug use was the only thing that ever brought us together. After freshman year, Matt transferred to Michigan State to study agriculture and Kurt and I went our separate ways.
Some weeks prior to graduation, I ran into Kurt at the library. As we began to speak to one another, there were acridly mixed elements of respect and embarrassment in the air. While we caught up and politely inquired about career plans, he began to excitedly explain his interests and ideas for the future.
His voice was soft, kind, and polite. This was not the same person who made crude jokes and giggled at me when I would begin to nod off after too many bong hits. In retrospect, though, that conversation seemed identical to ones I've had with ex-boyfriends. The ones where you run into one another on the street, flummoxed by the coincidence, yet regain enough composure to be cordial, and even seem to care about the fate of the other person. I did care about Kurt. I cared that, like me, he rebounded from a few semesters of terrible grades to graduate with a respectable GPA. I cared that, unlike other students who took drinking or drug use too far, he and I both experimented yet safely exited that world with little apparent harm done. And I was impressed with the warmth and genuineness he expressed to me that day. I wonder if it was the gentlemanly values instilled in him sometime in Prep school, or if it was just Kurt. I wonder.
