Survival part one

[mrissa]

So why was I asking about compliments again earlier today?

Well. Someone called Nameseeker was asking, in the comments to my post about Minicon and the "Geek, Be Not Ashamed" panel, what I'd recommend to someone going through a bad high school experience. What would help with that situation? It's a good question. It's one I've been thinking about. And a week from tomorrow I'll be part of Career Day at a local high school, and so while I'm hoping that it's a good one, not the really toxic atmosphere some of them are, it's got me thinking about that. And sure, like the man says, escape is a prisoner's first duty -- but nobody screws up high school so badly that they're still a sophomore at 47. So there's escape, but there's also the consideration of how to do it so that you'll be functional later. How to get free of it without chewing your leg off, so to speak. Not always easy.

Compliments were a major weapon at my high school. The barbed compliment, the sarcastic compliment, the compliment that turns on someone else present, the compliment that's supposed to erase months or years of ill-treatment...and then the complimenter can turn to others and say, "I was just trying to be nice." There was one girl at my high school -- which was, in case you hadn't heard by now, a pretty nasty one, although there were several salvageable experiences from it -- who was clearly trying to be nice by her own standards. She wanted to be known as a nice person. She also wanted to be "popular," in the high school sense of being in an in-crowd. And it did not occur to this kid that people would set the value of her attempted niceness much higher if she didn't spend her time with some of the meanest people in the school. If the sort of people who would kick handicapped kids in their leg braces and make fun of the kids who could barely speak a sentence didn't get a free pass from her on their behavior.

So I guess my first piece of advice for people trying to endure a toxic high school is to recognize that other people are having to live with the toxicity as well, and to be as kind as you can manage. Other people may not notice it. But it'll be something you know about yourself. You don't have to be indefinitely kind to people who are mean to you, but it might be useful to give people more than one chance; if they're used to hearing, "Is that a good book?" with derisive snickers behind it, they may not be prepared to take it as a serious and congenial discussion question the first time around.

(This is not the same thing as being as nice as you can manage. Nice is a club you can give other people to beat you with. Nice conforms to local standards, particularly for girls. "Nice" may prevent you from taking a good swing at the guy who kicked the girl in her leg braces. "Kind," on the other hand, may well tell you to go for it; sticking up for others can be very kind and well-remembered years later.)

This was meant to be a longer post, but with work on fiction and the ever-popular vertigo troubles, it's taken me this long just to get a start on it. So I'll try to do more later on the same theme, because I think it's unfortunately important.

Comments

[ellameena.livejournal.com]

I didn't respond to your poll because all compliments make me squirm. They are not all bad, and sometimes even kind of nice in spite of the squirming. But there's no question that complimenting someone is also an imposition, a social gesture fraught with meaning, laden with obligation, and often an attention-getting tactic on the part of the person giving the compliment. I never had trouble with compliments in high school, but by virtue of having someone in my life who is habitually giving compliments when what she really wants to say is "Love me please, please, please," I'm not crazy about them. A good complimenter uses them sparingly, and they are best used when the recipient is already in a positive mood.

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

Girls play good hockey.

Are you coming to Applecon?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Alas but no. Minicon was lovely, but it took a great deal of effort from me at this stage of PT stuff, and I'm not really up for another con yet. I hope you all have a wonderful time, though!

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

Boooooooooo

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I know.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

God, what an evil set of experiences you describe. (And what a good icon you have for this project.)

I'm going to spend a few minutes today being grateful for my high school. I'm sure there were mean people in it, but by the time I was 16 or 17, none of them were being mean where I had to notice, and it wasn't any kind of topic of conversation - no one sat around whispering, "Did you hear what ... said yesterday, to poor ...?"

It was a geek school. I think that makes all the difference. Once upon a time, it was a lab school*, and then I think it had a brief hope of being a School For The Gifted, but the only "Gifted" who ever came were the geeks, because it became self-perpetuating: the very smart kids who knew how to dress and who to have crushes on and were cut out to do well in high school anyhow could have gone to our school, but they were horrified at the idea. "I don't want to go there. It's full of freaks!"

Admittedly, in first few years, people were pretty mean, but in an unskilled, disorganized kind of way.

I'll tell you one thing that I, personally, helped a lot. It's not something the kids you'll be talking to have any power over, alas. The main thing was that we were 90% geeks. But I happen to believe that there was a lot of side help from the fact that we didn't have a cafeteria. The school didn't serve food, and we ate the food we brought sitting on the floors in the halls or perched in the stairwells, or outside. Every YA novel I have ever read depicting American high schools seems to point to The Cafeteria and Who Sits At Your Table At Lunch as being absolutely key in the unmanageable horror of high school.

Anyhow. We didn't sit around snarking at people, nor did we sit around fearing people. We barely sat around having crushes on peope. Mostly, we were too busy discussing whether to have a student strike because a particular teacher was boring and - we were very incensed about this - too lax in the classroom, or because they took away the ancient wooden desks we could and did write on and replaced them with modern blue things that were sort of plasticy and wouldn't take pencil marks. We were so upset. We were sure our civil rights were being abridged. We knew we weren't allowed to write on the desks, but we all felt that we should have the choice whether or not to obey that rule. And besides, the Paisley Desk had been the work of generations of students.

Geek school, represent. I would *not* have survived the kind of school you're describing.


* As the school's publicity will tell you ad nauseam, it's where New Math was invented and first taught. Now, New Math is now Old enough that most people my generation don't know what it means, so it would be fun if there were a more recent accomplishment, but still.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think it's extremely important for people not to dismiss the bad high school experiences as, "It's high school; they suck." Because not all high schools have to be really bad, and we are not, as adults, taxpayers, and members of society, off the hook for the ones that are.

I didn't go into the lunchroom much; I ate my lunch in the journalism room because it was the only time I could squeeze work on the newspaper into my schedule. I think that in some ways this was extremely good for my sanity.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

Since I'm back, replying to the question below, I'll add that I think you're quite right. Dismissing atrocities with, "Yeah, that's high school for you, whatchagonnado?" is a complete abdication of a very real responsibility we have to make that not "high schools for you."

The past 5-10 years have seen a small revolution in how a lot of people think and talk about bullying, although that has focussed on grade schools from what I've seen. Still, maybe it's cause for hope.

The thing is - and this is part of what I had hoped to think and write more about in my own journal and may yet manage - there's this weird alchemical reaction that goes on when adults interact with adolescents, in which a large part of the adult becomes again the adolescent they once were, while a small part stands in the middle of the ensuing chaos, yelling, "WE'RE THIRTY-TWO. THAT WAS NEARLY HALF OUR LIFE TIME AGO. WHERE ARE YOU GOING???" and being ignored, of course. Someone told me, the first time I'd had a job dealing with teens, what she had been told the first time she had had such a job, which was that the first thing that happens when you start interacting with a lot of teens is that whatever issues you had when you were their age come flooding back. For her it was constant fear she wasn't "cool" enough, that she would be mocked or rejected by the "cool" kids she was trying to hang around with. For me, it was quite different. But it happened, nonetheless.

So I think that's a piece of what happens when adults try to think about high schools - that they become 90% teens trying to think about high school. And so the "That's the way high school is" line becomes very self-fulfilling - that's how they internalized the idea that they couldn't change their peers, they just had to get through the bad spots as well as possible, and so then, when they're adults, that's what they revert to.

So the difficulty is not in giving teens a new line so that when they're adults they'll revert to it (unless it's, "I'm doing what I can for you about that now, and when you're an adult you'll have a chance to do it yourself,") but in trying to intercept the reversion process. I'm not sure how one does that. Everyone who works with teens much and has any success generally manages it somehow, but the 'how' is very individual, and handled in private.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Hmm, interesting. I wonder if going to college at a younger teen age than many people has given me a different spot to revert to, or whether I'm not doing this, or whether I'm just doing it in ways I haven't spotted yet.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

I was thinking about people who espoused that attitude with a teen in front of them, rather than in theory, but of course, it happens in theory, too. I'm not sure. But if I'm remembering right, you have a pretty awesome mother. Possibly one of the differences is in having had an adult on your side - but that makes a lot of assumptions. I don't know. I think differently about it, too, but I ascribe a lot of the differences first to the fact that I went to an unusual high school and second that I subsequently worked clinically with teens, which gave me a really different attitude to problematic behavior (e.g., "I can't necessarily change what you think and feel, though I may be able to help you change them, but there is something I can do about your behavior, it's my job to do it, I'm going to do it, and it's going to work. If I can get you on board with this so that it's not a fight, all the better.") Most people don't have that.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Actually it was both parents, not just mom.

And actually I meant when I'm dealing with them in person, not when I'm writing this sort of thing.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

I needed high school. There was cafeteria stress-- but that was because I was not good at organizing. I had no idea how to pick specific people out, my friends were mostly in band after I left and thus had a different lunch period, and so while I never noticed any table status markers, my lunches weren't fun unless I was with friends (freshman year) or elsewhere with friends (junior year choir room, senior year drama office).

But yeah, I needed it. I had been in a class of fairly exclusive banded-together Gifted Children for years, in the role of smartest (though I wasn't entirely) and weirdest, most likely to have someone else's party include a 'makeover' for me. Junior high was enough to break me out of that mold, but not enough to stabilize me into anything again. High school turned me into something that could function outside of school, I think, and while I didn't function *well* until college, that was not the fault of the school or entirely the school setting.

One of my roommates told gleeful tales of how Freshman Hell Week involved physical abuse at her school, and her brother, then a senior, had his friends act as bodyguards for her. I would not have done well in that setting, and I'm not sure I ever made it clear to her how much it bugged me that her school supported it.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It can be useful to learn to get bigger, stronger people to stick up for you. This can be a life skill. But recognizing that situations in which it's necessary are situations to be avoided, rather than normal parts of everyday life, is even more of a life skill.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

Wow - where was this high school (if you don't mind)? It sounds very much like the one I went to in Worthington, OH, but the little details are just different enough to make me think it isn't. I'm sort of trying to collect reports of actively good, respectful public schools for my own reference. (So if possible, I can send my children to one, and if not I can arm them with the sort of good advice + coping strategies Mrissa is giving.)

-Nameseeker

[callunav.livejournal.com]

Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, University High School. No going trying to uncover my secret identity, mind you.

It was originally a lab school for the U. of Illinois's School of Education. Then, around 1981, they decided they didn't want it, and the school was going to be closed, but one of the only other decent schools in the area had been closed the year before, so parents were roused and got donations and twisted arms, and so forth, and the school continued kind of on its own momentum, free-standing. It was like a private school that never had any money or any pretensions to any, and as a result only got the weirdos, which worked out really well for the weirdos. But it wanted to be a souped-up school for the gifted, and while I was there (late 80s) it just didn't have the wherewithal. There were maybe 4 electives students could take, we offered Japanese (on alternate years), Russian, French, German, and Latin, but not Spanish, and our sports teams were things of pathos. (I was well into college before I'd fully grasped that there actually were high schools with football teams.)

I don't know what it's like now. I know it's still open, but I don't know if it's still just muddling along, or if it got better funding along the way. (Getting rid of the director - we didn't have a principal, just a director - whom we all hated and who turned out to have been engaging in embezzlement on as grand a scale as he could manage may have helped.)

Good luck to you all.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

Thank you! It sounds like a very good experience (except the embezzling director). Mine was public, and something like a charter school, but started in the late '70s. In retrospect, it had much of the basic structure and assumptions of a small liberal-arts college.

-Nameseeker

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

All good stories and points... would you be willing to write this (or let me re-write this) as a post for Talk Hard!?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Why don't you e-mail me about what you'd want in that regard after you've read today's addition on this theme?

[zalena.livejournal.com]

I'm reading these in backward order; but I thought I'd mention that one of the best things about attending my high school reunion was the realization that most the people had grown up to be fairly decent human beings... and that a lot of the people I thought were my persecutors had experienced some pretty intense things at that age, too.

This is not particularly helpful advice for someone in the trenches; but it definitely helped with my long term attitude about the experience of high school and the people involved.

(BTW - I was disinclined to go to my reunion; but my best friend since the 2nd grade convinced me to go, and having her there with me definitely put a positive cast on the experience.)

HS reunions

[aedifica]

Yes! Though it was interesting that I could draw a line between those at my reunion who were willing to assume that everyone had grown up a bit since high school, and let's have a chat and learn who each other are now, and those who were unwilling or afraid to accept that you might be someone different now. Maybe those were people who haven't moved on themselves, or maybe they're just unobservant, I don't know. But I did enjoy my 10-year reunion and I'll probably go to the 20-year.