High School Underground: A Day in the Life

Santa Cruz High School is famous for its laid-back schedule. While other schools have the same six classes a student takes every day for the year, Santa Cruz High has three classes each semester in which we cram a year's worth of seemingly useless knowledge into our heads.

I say useless, because honestly, how many times in your life have you thought to yourself “Damn, I really wished I remembered how to graph a parabola in order to figure out the trajectory of this particle!”

This gives us the option to either be a go-getter by starting early and getting out at 1 p.m., giving us enough time to loiter downtown and make people think we are truants. Or follow the typical teen schedule and roll out of bed late in order to get out at 3 p.m.

Or, if you’re a smart and wily wabbit such as myself, you can take a cooking class that is only on Mondays,  allowing you to start at 9 a.m. and get out at 1 p.m. Yeah, yeah, I know it isn’t smart to slack off and that I could taking harder classes, but, well, turns out I don’t have a very good reason. I just really don’t want to. Besides, isn’t that what junior year is for?

Today I’d like to take you on a magic carpet ri-- I mean on a journey through the halls of Santa Cruz High. A day in the life of me, your typical and yet completely abnormal student. For my own sake (and the fact that I can’t think of a better way to take you through a day in the life) I’m making you, my reader, into my shadow.

Now, to get down to the really interesting stuff (depending on what you think of as interesting; frankly, I don’t find what kids have to say about their day at school terribly interesting at all):

Who knows though, you might find daily updates incredibly fascinating. I start off the day with English 2 intensive. Which, it turns out, doesn’t actually do anything for me except give more homework than regular English classes while simultaneously managing to make kids think I’m snobby if I add the “intensive” to the end of it.

It’s a good class, though, and my absolute favorite. We’re reading Hamlet right now, and our teacher takes full advantage of being able to silence us kids when she asks a question, and we all know the answer has some sexual thing involved. We become mutes, as though we couldn’t say the word even if we did know it. I don’t know what the big deal is, it’s easy to say s-- … se- … well you know. That word.

Next, and now you’ll see just how difficult my schedule is, I have lunch.

Santa Cruz High being an open campus, I round up my usual troupe consisting of my girlfriend, Maddie, and my good friends, Cory and Erin (commonly referred to as “the little ones” because of their, well, vertical deficiencies), and we, along with most other students, head to downtown Santa Cruz.

I always wonder how strange it must be for people downtown at lunchtime, but then again it is downtown Santa Cruz, so maybe there’s nothing that can surprise us anymore. (I’m sure) It’s a totally normal day (once again, for downtown), when suddenly packs of backpack-strung teens flood the streets, while the privileged few with cars honk their horns. I don’t think the food joints downtown will ever have a problem when there aren’t tourists about; we could keep that economy afloat all by ourselves.

 After lunch I have World Civ … Intensive. Which when asked about, I get the same dirty look for the same adjective. This is my last class of the day (excluding Mondays), so of course, it’s the longest. I don’t know why, but for some reason there are kids who seemingly know everything about the French revolution and World War I.

I mean, honestly, does everyone know this much about history, or am I the only one who had no idea who Robespierre was? Some days I’ll raise my hand, convinced that I’ve come up with this genius anecdote, and wouldn’t you know it, my teacher will pick one of these genius, light-bulb-over-their-head-always-on kids, and it’ll make what I was about to say look like, “History … happened.”

Most days I spend (and I hope my teacher isn’t reading this) my time doodling while these kids go on rants over some European treaty I had no idea even existed. Every day it’s basically a class of four, and the rest of us are just there to sit in awe over their uselessly expansive knowledge on politics from a time gone by.

It’s hard enough for me to follow the politics of here and now, the ones that affect me immediately, but then, that’s a whole other column …