{"id":50032,"date":"2022-10-14T01:00:32","date_gmt":"2022-10-14T05:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=50032"},"modified":"2022-10-14T09:16:49","modified_gmt":"2022-10-14T13:16:49","slug":"qotd-high-school","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2022\/10\/14\/qotd-high-school\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: High school"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Those of us on the back nine of our lives remember high school as a process of differential diagnosis. You try on a certain set of social roles to see which, if any, fit. You don’t go out for the baseball team because it’s the first step to making the Majors. Really, you might not even like<\/em> playing baseball all that much. You go out for the baseball team because you want to be a Jock. If you make the team, you’re a Jock for a while, leading the Jock life and learning its lessons. If you don’t make the team, you go find something else \u2014 the Debate Club, heavy metal music, whatever \u2014 and learn the lessons those lifestyles teach.<\/p>\n

You didn’t understand this back then, of course, but your parents did, and \u2014 crucially \u2014 your teachers did. If you wanted to be a Metalhead this semester, they’d treat you like a Metalhead, complete with the “Why are you wasting your potential (and ruining your ears) with that godawful noise<\/em>?” They’d make a show of having a Very Serious Conversation with you about the dangers of drugs and satanism … knowing full well that you weren’t<\/em> on drugs, weren’t<\/em> sacrificing virgins to Moloch (if for no other reason than you didn’t actually know any girls), and would, in fact, come back as a clean-scrubbed Preppie after summer break your junior year.<\/p>\n

The key word in “adolescent rebellion”, after all, is adolescent<\/em>. All of that stuff was just practice. If it proceeded in the normal way, what going through all the permutations of high school identity taught you was:<\/p>\n