October 2003 | High School Confidential

My recent rant about my school days led me to ponder my completely useless experience at one Del Campo High School of Fair Oaks, California, where I served a four year sentence marinating in a culture that zealously marginalized students who were not already high achievers with over-involved stage parents, and proudly embraced every conventional, depressing detail expected of a middle-of-the-road suburban California K-12 public school in the mid 1980’s (and probably today).

The web site these days reflects a bracing, academic focus reflective of our paranoid and competitive times, but that surely says nothing about the 75% of students sitting there doing time each day who were just like me, maybe smart, maybe not, maybe who once showed tremendous intellectual potential or maybe who never did, but who did not enter the school with a 4.0 and parents breathing down their every essay and extracurricular activity, and thus were, as far as Del Campo was concerned, merely a large mass of cattle to be herded through the system toward an end no one gave much particular thought about.

For those few kids whose parents had drilled in them the importance of early achievement, there was supplied a small minority of collegiate-style teachers with horn rimmed specs, unkempt Einsteinian hair, or other quirky intellectual tics, who made sure that these smiling, fair-haired, well-groomed, religious teenagers in expensive clothing were exposed to all the right minor Shakespearian works, summer trips to France, and other trappings of a “good school.” For the rest of the masses, no adult spoke to any of us, even one time in four years, about what we might do with our futures, what high school had to do with any of it, if we knew how to get into college or even what the point of it was, or why, perhaps, a student who scored well on aptitude exams was getting a D in crafts, and how they might be able to assist.

In fact, on more occasions than I could possibly recount, they insinuated we were useless “rockers” or “deadbeats” with derisive dismissals, took pleasure in humiliating us for not completing homework or not paying attention in class, and even sometimes took to telling us that some people were just not intended to achieve as much as others, and so in the end, our only job was to attend just as many classes as it took to graduate, which all told, certainly was not enough to obtain any whit of a quality education.

One could easily say high school is a two way street, and those kids who failed to reach for the brass ring could not expect institutional support for their apathy, but I look back on those years and know the truth, which was in my case, that I just really needed an adult to give a crap and explain the future to me, and maybe ask me one time why I was having academic problems, and what did I know about college (nothing). I was a person wholly ignorant of adult future realities, who found the so-called academic purpose of high school much obscured by its depressing and stressful Darwinian social system, and the bottom line is, I really could have used some adult perspective and concern. I did not receive any, and I did not know how to ask for it. So, like thousands of my peers, I rotted in that school for four years, cutting classes, getting failing grades, inching along without any guidance or roadmaps about how I might turn any of it around. I barely graduated with a sub-C GPA, after being yelled at by the vice principal that, if I’d missed one more class, I’d be held back another year.

As it happens, I got lucky. I had friends who did have a clue about college, and encouraged me to attend junior college, and later to transfer to the University of California. It was the damndest thing, but from the first semester of college, my grades were high and stayed that way until I got my degree. Suddenly, potential. Where had it been? Isn’t it amazing? Surely, it suddenly struck me at 19, like a superpower conferred by a spider bite. Because it potential had existed in me before then, I certainly would have expected four years, and, really, twelve years worth of teachers to have noticed it before.

No, as all of us know, every teacher I ever had in K-12 was busily spit-polishing the shiny potential of the easiest pre-fabricated achievers who came with their own staff of cheerleaders and coaches from their days in the cradle, because it was an easy win, and in the end, the perfect expression of American values: for someone to win, someone else has to lose, and best not to think about the latter too much. The most well-groomed, pleasingly conformist students, who’d been carefully trained to follow a roadmap of parent, teacher, and societal approval, were the ones who ended up on the summer school French trips, and who ended up in the fun, inspiring English classes taught by the wild-haired intellectual, professorial 11th grade English teachers, while the rest of us were taught by angry, apathetic detention hall supervisors who spoke to us with knowingly dismissive insults: “see you next fall,” in our senior year.

So, based on my true-life testimony as a diploma-holding alumnus of Del Campo High School, you can read the following statement from Del Campo’s Web site and judge for yourself if it’s fact or fiction.

“Del Campo staff believes all students should have maximum opportunity to reach their potential, and supports the students' rights to succeed by maintaining high expectations for achievement, behavior, and attendance. Staff, students and families work together to provide a safe, challenging and enriched learning experience for our students.”

So Del Campo, I won’t walk away from you, as you walked away from me and my countless peers. Here are some tips for you to really turn it around, not just for the top 10%, but for the majority of the student body, whom it is your tax-funded obligation to provide “a safe, challenging, and enriching learning experience.”

• Appoint someone—teachers, counselors, parent volunteers- to talk with every student—every one, not just the shiny, friendly, religious ones on the drill team or in the Spanish club— yes, that means the scary kids with nose rings, the kids that act like they really don’t want to talk to you, the kids with behavior problems who you’ve already decided are a lost cause—and talk to them every single semester, and probably more often, about who they are, what kind of experience they are having in high school, and what they want to do with their future. Create a plan with them, and help them follow up on it. Give them information. Explain the options. Look for potential. I promise, it’s there, even if the kid is not the cheer captain.
• Tone down the lock-step devotion to mainstream, socially distressful, academically distracting garbage like cheerleading, football, pep rallies, and other instruments of social stratification that make for an unpleasant and sometimes hostile environment for frankly the majority of students. High school is for education. When I was there, it seemed more like a pretense for the real goal, to provide candidates for athletic events and popularity contests. This crap is not helping most people learn. If you insist on keeping these banal institutions in place, provide options and alternatives for the kids who think it is bullshit, which is most of us. Don’t post attendance monitors outside of pep rallies, to catch and punish us when we try to escape mandatory displays of “school spirit” featuring drunk, popular asshole guys cross-dressing as cheerleaders, while dispirited, unpopular masses are forced to watch.
• Create some kind of standards for classes designated as holding tanks for underachieving students, and hold your bitter, dismissive teachers accountable when they reinforce the already lousy self-perception of a bunch of discarded 16 year old kids by insulting them in front of their peers, and making it clear that they themselves think the class is a futile attempt to teach the unteachable.
• Show underachieving kids the possibilities of the real world, by taking them on college tours, or having them observe someone in an interesting profession. Yes, you heard me right. Take underachieving kids on college tours.

Or, never mind, I am sure leaving the status quo as-is and just buying a few more metal detectors will achieve the same results. And Del Campo? Here’s your diploma back. There must have been some mistake in where I spent four years of my life, because the school that conferred a diploma upon me back in 1989 certainly was not “committed to providing students at all levels a rigorous academic program.” That might have come in handy, though.

Hey, peeps. Send mail to mail@tiny-dog.com.