How much stock do you hold of your high-school memories?
 

Do you consciously feel like they were quintessential in shaping you or do you feel like the high-school you and the you of today are two completely, completely different people (even besides the inevitable and invariable changes what come with increasing age, experience and maturity)?

Negative experiences can be anything from being misunderstood by teachers to getting bullied (or maybe being the bully yourself and feeling low-key ashamed of it looking back) to just being forced to socialise with people you never liked or had that much in common with (so-you felt). Or forced to play P.E. and still feeling insecure about your physical competence and capabilities thereof as a result. It could be absolutely anything and everything negative under the sun.

It did shape me, but I am a different person now as to what I was like then.

Captain fantastic at school, house captain. Sports champion. Bursary sitter pre high school.

Then the girls came along...and.. and ..and that first whiff on ya finger. My life flipped, in came the music and girls, and out went the sport.

I probably would have went on to represent my country at rugby. Until that whiff.


Got some good musical taste though, even though the women I'm resigned to nowadays(if any at all) just dont have that same whiff anymore.

One high school town where I'm from.

I was a good student in the academic sense and being well-behaved but I have a lot of negative feelings directed that way (my high-school) generally. It wasn’t all bad and I do keep in touch with quite a few (a lot of us went to the same church/had the same communal affiliation so I was always going to be about their lives in some capacity anyway) but looking back much of it was pretty bleak and frustrating. I felt that at the time and hindsight hasn’t softened me on that front. Some truly awful things happened there. I own my personality flaws and one thing I am to an extent (as nice as I am otherwise) is a bitter person at the best of times but school hits differently when you’re surrounded by so many awful, gaslight-y people.

dont really have too many strong memories, my high school is a now a housing estate

Do ye call it high school in Britain? I thought that was American, its Secondary school here

I went to a high school and a primary

England have some really weird stuff going on and names - upper school middle school - really tragic :umm2:

we go primary from 5-11 and high school from 11-18

jobs a good un

Same when I went to school, secondary

Technically it’s secondary school but often people just adapt the Americanised version in normal speech and call it high-school. I’m one of those people.

We have the same age wise but it's primary and secondary schools

Oddly though we call University - College same as the USA, Britain's version of college before University sounds like what we'd just call "still secondary school "

Do you not have official sixth-forms/sixth-form colleges in Ireland?

Like, what’s the official equivalent over there?

I take it you won’t be going to any high-school reunions any time soon.

I've never heard of anyone going to an 'upper school' or 'middle school' lol, there may be a few around the country but the vast majority just do secondary school 11-18

No, Secondary school is for 6 years, you do 1st year to 3rd year and at the end of 3rd year you do state exams called the Junior cert which I think would be similar to your GCSEs. Then there's 4th year or Transition Year which is optional, in that year there's a lot of trips/work experience and more fun stuff. Then there's 5th and 6th year and at the end of 6th year you do the Leaving Cert which is state exams and I think this is similar to your A Levels, the results you get here will determine what College (University) course you can get in to. For the leaving Cert the results work on a points system, they take the results of your 6 best subjects (most people do 7) in schools here you have to do exams in Irish, English and Maths and then you pick 4 others

Need a university degree just to figure that out :huh:

:laugh2:

I called it secondary school.

my old school is a housing estate now too, It would be different time frames, but i do wonder :laugh:

and to answer the op, the influence of school shrinks proportionately to your age

and just to further complicate things, i went to an upper school after o'grades

In answer to the question in the OP, I suppose the most prevailing thing about Secondary school in regards to my current life is my 3 best friends still being in my life and who I'm very close to still. The teenage years hold a lot of powerful memories, so much happens then, so many changes etc and it's great to have the people that knew me back then and went through a lot of that stuff with me still involved in my life now

Definitely. People change throughout their lives but let’s just say there’s nothing like being a teenager as far as going through phases and significant, jarring changes go. The original teenager I was (from let’s say 14) is quite different from the teenager I was at 15 and that was very different to who I was at 17, talk less of 19. You’re still just that one person at your core but sometimes it feels like completely different people (or at least very different versions of yourself) came and went at various points in the teens. That’s why I try not to judge people (not necessarily negatively judge but y’know) too much based on how I last remember them in their teens. Too much changes happen in adolescence to use the yardstick for ascertaining what you think is their personality based on things they might’ve said and/or did when they were literally 14/15. Even school bullies change.

Oh yes absolutely. I feel a bit sorry for teens as well who grew up with social media/video/pictures etc that recorded all that cringey/embarrassing stuff that happens as you go through those phases. All I had were diaries that I eventually burned :laugh:

The funny thing is though is that in spite of all that exposure to social media today’s teenagers (in the last five years anyway) seem to be increasingly infantilised. I’d love to say I have a reverse crystal-ball of experiencing teenagers grow up throughout the ages but I’m not Methuselah so y’know. But what I have definitely observed is that 16-year-olds of (say) 2009 looked and acted much older than the ones around now, especially the boys (girls are a bit more mature than boys and do have that advantage of make-up to make themselves look much older). Shows like World’s Strictest Parents and Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents (or whatever it was called). Today’s teenagers might smoke a bit of pot (like they always have done) but cigarette smoking is completely out of vogue with anyone under a certain age and they don’t seem to have much stomach for alcohol anymore. All they seem to want to do is vape and watch TikTok videos. Anyone who was born after 1998/1999 grew up a little different anyway but the actual teenagers of today seem so much younger than the teens of 10 to 20 years ago. Drinking cider in parks on Friday nights, smoking Lambert and Butler and looking like actual adults when they’re in college just isn’t their way. Knife-crime’s unfortunately more of a problem with today’s teens but luckily that’s only an extreme. Besides that they seem so much softer.

That's so true, I moved to America when I was 18 and fresh out of school, I was in London by 19 with an Aussie friend I'd made in Boston(we're still good friends to this day actually and she's coming to Ireland for a visit in June :love: ) and we really were thrown in at the deep end of figuring life out money/accommodation/work/keeping ourselves alive etc :laugh: The only contact I had with family and friends back in Ireland then was letters and the occasional phone call from a payphone (it was pretty expensive back then to make international calls)