We'd done something similar back in January, with fewer people, and that too had been special. I've since shared my experiences with current friends and acquaintances, and I've concluded that people hold one of two opinions concerning high school reunions:
- "like omg that's awesome I should totally do that too!!1!one!"
- "lulz phail, who wants to see those losers again?"
Surprisingly, the downers outnumber the uppers roughly three to one...
Last year I'd already noticed an overall negative attitude toward this sort of event among my older non-school friends,acquaintances, family, and some online communities. So the question begs to be asked (which is what journalists should say instead of "it begs the question," which philosophers know is hugely different)... am I normal or are they? Because back in high school, I loved almost every moment spent in class and I would gladly return to those days if I could.
Bit of a background. You have to understand that "class" means something different in Italy. What model Americans follow in primary school we retain through secondary, at least in part. A "class" is a group of (usually) 20-30 students who share the same classroom and the same courses. Each class is assigned eight to ten teachers, one for each subject. Teachers then walk from classroom to classroom and teach their subjects in one-hour periods. There are no courses to take and drop: there is a fixed, mandatory, nationwide curriculum throughout the five years (Italian grammar/lit, foreign grammar/lit, math, history, and PE) and then another fixed curriculum depending on your emphasis. An emphasis is one of six preferred areas of study/concentration: science, classics, education, languages, art, and music. It's a sort of "mini-major" to prepare you for college work. You choose your emphasis your first year (though you may change it later) and students with the same emphasis study together. We had science and technology, an expmerimental and now dead form of the scientific emphasis, meaning we took five years of biology, chemistry, physics, computer science, and technical education, as opposed for example to the "classical" emphasis who did five years of Latin and Greek but had no science other than math and some minor biology. Some subjects are absent from some curricula (e.g., no Latin or Greek for us) and some others are equal for all but not for all five years (philosophy is three years each regardless of your emphasis). The number of weekly hours also varies greatly across emphases, with a whopping 5 weekly hours of math for us as opposed to 2 in the classical.
Keeping this in mind, it follows that when you sit with the same people six hours a day nine months a year, you grow close to them. In our class of 20-25, all were on good terms with all, with exceptions of course, and with varying degrees of out-of-class involvement. But we were still all pretty close, knew each other well, and were there for each other through the tough and the good times, through crushes, breakups, hangovers, school politics (including memorable yelling matches with teachers! yeah you can do that in Italy), and the usual teen drama you'd expect.
How typical is this? Sure was typical in my school. It was a public institute in Rome, a tall downtown building that housed 900+ students, four emphases, and approx. 40 faculty... so not huge or tiny, and pretty representative of Italian public secondary schooling. Nothing I can see set us apart from other schools and kids, and yet we seem to have "withstood the test of time" so much better. As is typical in public schools, most had very different social backgrounds, from the preppies with nice shirts and cologne to those whose family lived pretty much on food stamps (public school is, of course, almost free of charge, as are most textbooks for low-income families).
Perhaps most other kids went along well while in school but entertained no desire to meet up later even when given the chance. In other words, since school thus conceived is a sort of hybrid between a primary and a secondary group, they felt more "secondary" than "primary" and got away from that group as soon as they could. Or perhaps those are most vociferous who were outcasts and now have no desire to reconnect with their high-school nemeses, while the in-crowds just meet up again gladly and are quieter about it. As I said, though, the "in-crowd vs. outcast" separation wasn't really much of an issue at all: with really minor exceptions, most of us were on good terms and bullying was practically non-existent in public schools in the mid-1990s. So I really don't know. It puzzles me a great deal.
It took us ten minutes tonight to slip back into the old group dynamics. Surely we're a tad more mature, most have jobs, many have tertiary/professional degrees or are working toward doctorates, etc... but right away we behaved pretty much as we used to ten years ago, laughed at the same dumb stuff we used to, made the same old jokes to each other, and we had a blast. I hadn't laughed so hard in years.
Not sure what morale to draw from this, but I remain puzzled as to why popular opinion of high school reunions runs so low around here. Maybe I really did get lucky, but it's hard to accept that things would be in such a sorry state generally while we've had a grand time for years.
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