Students everywhere went back to school this week, kicking off another year of academics, athletics, and if you go to school in Outlook, another year of spending your noon hours or spare periods standing outside the D&E convenience store or doing the cruise lap with your friends.
I get that those last two things are very specific to this area, but it’s almost as big of a signal that another fall has arrived as the changing of the leaves.
I freely admit that I was never the greatest student; I think I was pretty much one of those ‘coasters’ that did just enough to get by to ensure that I would eventually graduate. In all honesty, I wish I could go back in time and give advice to my younger self about being a better student, but the time machine hasn’t been invented by Apple yet, and even if it was, I’d hate to buy it only for a newer, “better” version to keep coming out for my hard-earned money every 18 months.
That’s not to say I didn’t have my favorite classes or teachers, or that I couldn’t be a better student when I really had something to sink my teeth into. By the time I’d hit my senior years at Outlook High School, that was when the course offerings became really unique and I took classes such as ‘Media Studies’ and ‘Life Transitions’.
‘Life Transitions’ was a class that combined students from multiple grades who wanted to take it, and even then it wasn’t the largest group; I want to say there were maybe 15 or so of us in the class. The course was all about helping students transition to life after high school; I guess it’s not really difficult to decipher from the name, huh? I enjoyed it because it was different from the standard math or science class that required textbooks and copious pages of notes, as ‘Life Transitions’ was all about asking more personal questions about where you wanted to take your life after your academic career, and also tackled more serious issues such as drug and alcohol abuse.
‘Media Studies’, on the other hand, may have been my overall favorite because it was, well, all about studying media and its impact on the everyday world. We dissected the nightly news, discussed Oscar-winning movies, and watched documentaries such as one entitled, ‘The Cola Wars’, which was all about Coke vs Pepsi (a battle that still rages on today) and how each company’s advertising worked on us as the consumers. It was a great class that got us asking questions about the world around us, and it was something I looked forward to about going to school. They should really bring this one back!
But school as a whole was still a mixed bag of emotions, as it is for every kid still going and every former student who walked the halls of good ol’ OHS. You learn to take the good with the bad, and all of it combines together to give you a life experience that is unique to you.
From my own experience, one bad thing turned out to be the best thing that could’ve happened to me. I was held back in Grade 8 at the end of the school year in 1999, which shattered me emotionally and kept me in a depressive state that entire summer. I became a recluse, didn’t go out much, and dreaded that first day of school when literally *everyone* was going to find out that I flunked.
However, that bad soon turned to good because I met the guys who would become my absolute best friends. I had to be pulled down into the proverbial trenches to see who I’d be coming out of them with. Not many people will say that failing a grade was the best thing in life that happened to them, but I do.
It wasn’t all bad things that turned into good. Some things just stayed negative and left a bad taste in all of our mouths. For one thing, our principal was fired just two months before graduation back in 2004. Students weren’t told anything, and we were pretty much just expected to drop it and move on with the rest of the school year. Rumors swirled as they tend to do, and in the end I think what happened was Mr. Gallagher simply stepped on his superior’s toes one time too many and he got the boot. It ended up casting a bit of a dark pall over graduation, which was made even more ominous by the epic rain and thunderstorm that happened on Grad Day.
School life is truly what you make of it. You have to work hard, but you also have to stop and enjoy the little things that make it fun and unique. Do the things that make you laugh, and don’t be afraid to step out of your comfort zone.
Because one day you may look back as a weekly newspaper reporter at the start of a new school year and think, “Man, it was pretty cool being a ‘Blue’, wasn’t it?”
For this week, that’s been the Ruttle Report.
