Victory!  High school was defeated!  Well, “defeated” is the wrong word but it’s finished.   It truly was one of the greatest experiences of my life.   Along the way I had my doubts as to if I’d make it through but it ended up being an amazingly fun time.  Everyone at the school was a pleasure to be around and I have the greatest thanks for my principal, Dale McLane, who took a chance on me and the whole experiment and who I consider a great friend. 

In the picture is Kevin Kaufman, the filmmaker who made “Todd vs. High School” with me.  He has done a brilliant job so far and now we’ve started editing the movie.  I think it’s going to be really good. 

I’m not going to make any promises about more updates because I’m clearly not good about coming on here but I’ll let everyone know when the film’s coming out. 

Thank you all for your support.  It meant a lot.

Apologies for the delay in posting.  I’d fallen into a bit of a motivational rut.  Lazieness and senioritis have combined for a period of academic apathy.  Tardys, missed days, and half-done assignments were par for the course and updating somehow got tossed into that mix.

While I’d only been doing just enough work to get by over the last month and doing just ok on tests, during this time period I’ve had a lot of fun actually.  The school I’m at is just as great as its always been and and the people still make the days really enjoyable.  In that sense, I started thinking about if there was even a need to put more effort into my work.  It’s a very challenging school academically and I had pushed myself so hard off the start that this felt like a vacation.  I’d been pretty happy cruising by  during this time period; less stress, more free time, actually getting some sleep.

But what it did, really, was get me to think about an internal debate we all have that’s not even about school: how hard should we push ourselves?  What is the balance and relationship between happiness and success?

School is an interesting prism to view this issue through in the respect that while in our adult lives these concepts seem very vauge, in school there’s such a direct correlation between hard work and success.  And more to the point, there are cold, hard, numbers that let us know how we do.  So in that sense, we need to all decide what is acceptable to us.  Am I happy as a 3.0 student who does just enough to get by and has fun?  What’s wrong with just cruising through school and being happy?  Would I be happier as a 4.0 student who works hard but is perpetually stressed and goal focused?  Or will I only be happy if I’m #1 in my class?   Is there a balance that’s acceptable?   Should I just focus on learning and let the grades be what they are?   What is that balance?

Well for me I decided that while I’d been having fun goofing off, something felt wrong.  It’s almost hard to articulate and it’s also hard for me to determine how much of that feeling is from within and how much of it is from a programed sense of responsibility but I do feel the need to push myself more.  Not even so much to get better grades, but (cliche alert!) to take advantage of the opportunity to learn and apply myself to the best of my abilities (or at least closer to them).  I only have 6 weeks left of school and for whatever reason, I just feel like it’s something I need to do.  Hopefully in doing this I’ll gain a better sense of the larger question of “why” but for now that it feels right is enough.

Or who knows, maybe I just think too much.  Mostly I’m just getting sad that school is coming to an end.  Whoever thought I’d ever say that.

Sorry again dear readers, I know some of you have sent e-mails asking what was going on and want to hear more.   I’ll be updating more from here on out.

Does something seem strange about this list to you besides the fact that “Andy Roddick Beat Me With a Frying Pan” isn’t on it?   With all of the great books at our disposal, why isn’t there anything more modern being taught?  I really don’t understand the Shakespeare fascination and probably never will. To me, he’s just a writer who was trying to write entertaining material.  There’s no greater purpose to reading his work beyond that.  But I think if you made a list of books most enjoyed by high school students none of the Shakespeare would be in the list.  Which raises the question:  Why are we not trying to encourage students to love reading instead of forcing things on them we know they won’t like?

MOST TAUGHT BOOKS IN HS
1. Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare
2. Macbeth by Shakespeare
3. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
4. Julius Caesar by Shakespeare
5. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

This wasn’t quite what I had in mind when I said I was going back to high school to dominate athletically.

Been meaning to post this one for a while:

I saw some of my 90’s high school friends this weekend at a tailgate before the Pitt and Navy football game. I couldn’t drink per my new regimen, though the temptation, beers, and boozers were all around. But after watching a parking lot filled with tons of college kids trying way to hard to act rowdy before the game, I was grateful for my teetotaling.

One of the weirdest things about seeing this now that I’m back in high school is how clear it is that college students are way less mature than high schoolers. This is something I’ve always contended but seeing the collegiate crowd a day after being in high school made it more clear to me. Maybe “mature” is the wrong word, but there’s something incredibly annoying about college students to me.

From my experience, both the first time around and now, high school students, by and large, have a certain degree of individuality and cleverness that’s enjoyable. College students, on the other hand, drive me nuts. There’s much less room for uniqueness. Personalities seem to become more crafted and trying to act cool trumps all. I’ve always felt that from a personality perspective college ruins a lot of good and interesting people.

So my message is this: don’t go to college! No, not that, but if you do go, just stay who you are and find people there who don’t care if you do or don’t drink and prefer weird jokes to beer themed humor.

Sitting here on a Sunday night, dreading the school week.  Last week I had tons of tests and quizzes and was pretty worn out when the weekend rolled around.  Now the week is about to start again and the majority of my thoughts are negative; not enough sleep, run down, can’t even stay up to watch the football games, too much homework… pretty standard high schooler stuff.  On top of that, I realized I needed to put a post up and decided to take the lazy way out by finding a high school news story and just commenting on that.  But when I typed in “high school” to a Google news search my perspective on the week did change a bit.  Things, it appears, could certainly be worse:

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Special Needs Teacher Killed at Texas High School

NY students suspended over raw-meat hazing ritual

Felony charges in bus attack

Axe - Wielding Pupil Wounds Several In German School

Florida school officials won’t go to jail for praying

High School Drug Ring Shut Down, Police Say

Tony Danza shows high school students who’s boss

Missouri high school students arrested after $30000 theft

2nd arrest for teacher in alcohol, pot case

Student Stabbed to Death in Florida

Masked police chief sparks brief school lockdown

Cops arrest suspect after gunfire near Houston high school

Extra police near Fenger High School after beating death

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There’s about 100 more of these, and that’s just a sampling of the first page of one day of high school news.  As much as I hate to admit it, I have it about as good as possible.  Yet while these awful occurrences are pretty much inconceivable at Trinity, within a five mile radius there are multiple high schools that this kind of stuff happens in all the time.

This train of thought, and post, would have seemed very trite to me the first time I was in high school.  If someone tried to give me the whole “Don’t take how good you have it for granted” spiel would have been annoying to me.  That is if I paid attention to what they were saying at all.  But somewhere along the way that stuff starts to click in your head.  Maybe it’s when you actually get exposed to some of the kinds of people that populate the Google news stories you develop a different perspective on it but there certainly are worse things in the world than my complaints and thank goodness I’m in high school where I am. 

Complaining to resume as normal tomorrow….

When I see people from high school who are not taking care of themselves and looking prematurely old and weird it makes me feel like they’re betraying some kind of bond or something. Like they’re doing something unfair to me by reminding me of how old I am. Where as when I see someone who looks the same, it makes me like them more, as if we’re on the same team.

The same goes for anyone from high school who has a totally different personality and acts like they’re a serious adult…all it does is depress meI don’t even want to think about how depressed I make people when they see me. Although, to be fair, maybe I depress them with the fact that I still act like I’m in High School, which I am, so in that sense I guess they only have themselves to blame for their depression. Have I mentioned I’m deliriously tired again?

The girl in this video might be taking the “not getting prematurely old” thing a little far though…

I was so exhausted when I came home I fell asleep on the recliner at 6:30 and just got up now at 5:00 AM. I have a ton of homework to do before school I’m going to start on right after this post. I’ve found I have two different times I can fall asleep. Either between 1 and 3 AM, which obviously isn’t good because I need to be up at 7:00 AM for school, or immediately when I get home where I pass out from exhaustion.

One thing I’ve noticed is how much more productive I am when rested. I spent my study halls in school yesterday trying, trying, trying, to get my homework done, but it just wasn’t happening because my mind was so ready to shut down. Now that I actually caught up on a little sleep, it should be a breeze. Knowing this, I don’t even try to fight staying awake when I get home and just make sure to set an alarm so I’m up in time to do my work.

Seeing how important sleep is, I don’t understand how culturally there’s this weird attitude towards it. It’s like we’re supposed to be ashamed of wanting and needing to rest. Every school I’ve ever been to has kids who just don’t naturally get to sleep at a time that’s in line with the school schedule and who suffer for it. I’d go as far to say as a lack of sleep is the primary cause of my failings in school the first time around. There’s tons of evidence to support that teens need a different schedule than what the school system is on.

What’s nice is the principal at my new school gets that, and believes school should start later. We start at 8:15 which is actually pretty late by most high school standards, but still earlier than most any adults jobs start. The problem is for school to start later the entire city school system would have to change their busing times. This is something I’d love to see happen.

Read the link below, it explains it in pretty straightforward terms:

http://www.cehd.umn.edu/pubs/ResearchWorks/sleep.html

NOTE: It’s amazing how much easier it is to write these when the other option is doing homework.  I have no excuse now for not having any of my work done today.

Hi, it’s Jill! Here’s the transcript of a quick little Q&A with Todd. Interview by Josh Rowntree of MSA Sports Network. Can you tell which high school soccer player is Todd in this team photo?

Showed some veteran savvy today.  Had a talk with one of the freshmen after my Spanish 1 class about not asking the teacher if she wants our homework assignments.