End of Summer; Back to School

This picture serves a triple purpose.  First, L got her braces off last week.  Here is her 100 mega watt smile!  She is thrilled to be rid of the braces!

Second, today was the last swim meet of the summer.  Today, it was so overcast and, during the race just preceding this picture, rainy.  L said that during that particular race, when she came up for air, she got a mouthful of rain every time.  (After this event, they had a 30-minute break while they waited for the rainy weather to pass.)

This brings me to the third purpose--how grown up my daughter is getting as it relates to how old I am getting.  This week, she and I went to the high school to get a locker for her.  You know what?  There is nothing about that high school (except its name, three classrooms and a gym) that in anyway resembles the high school I attended several decades ago.

(As an aside, I have always wondered whether the word "several" means two or three or more!?! In this case, it is more than two and less than four and a little added in for good measure.)

The other day, while taking L to swim practice, I burst into singing the old high school song.  I think I must have been warming up for our trip to get the locker later that day!  She said, "What's that you're singing?"  In all fairness, the school song has been changed since I was in high school and it had been changed before I went to high school so depending on when you went to school there, you would sing a different song.  Literally.

The high school today has more students enrolled than the high school did "in my day."  There were about five hundred students and my high school had grades 7-12.  This has grades 10-12, and has probably about 1000 students.  Most of the students in my class (aside from the kids from "up the river") had gone K through 12 together and we had eaten in the same lunch room for all twelve years of school.  This high school has students who (assuming they have attended school here "forever") have come from four different elementary schools, one intermediate school and one middle school.  There were kids everywhere on the day we went to get the locker and it was only sophomore registration that day.

This is not to say that there are not good things at the school, improvements over the old version of the high school--such as getting a nicer school.  As I understand it, some of the school is slated for demolition and a new school is going to be built.  The entire school that is in use right now is newer, nicer and in better condition than the school of the same name that I attended.  The class offerings have more variety.  There are more teachers that teach any given subject.  There is a girls' athletics program now.  It is too bad there was no girls' athletics program when I was in school, not for me but for other girls who would have loved that.  The girls do not have to wear dresses or pants suits to school. (L did not even know what a pants suit was!)  The kids actually have to do homework (which I think is an improvement, up to a point).  There is more diversity--more "room" for people to fit in.  There are so many more friends to make and so many different activities available.

The school calendar that was sent out recently was for two months and had only athletics on it.  Maybe the school is so big that there can be no comprehensive calendar of events even for one month.  I have never seen one in the two years my older son has already attended that school and I cannot even find one online.  Our school secretary at the old high school would have known each student, his/her genealogy, address, and definitely what was going on day to day--off the top of her head.  Now, there are so many athletic teams, so many clubs, so many THINGS these kids have the opportunity to do, that probably no one person at the high school really knows what is going on and so consequently, neither do I.

There is not one teacher who is still there from my time at the high school and I am older than the principal.  Egad!  (I would not know that except that he told me his age as he and I were chatting.)  Maybe if I would have had a child very close to the time of my high school graduation, and not spent more than a dozen years post high school in spinsterhood, I might have sent that child through a school that I could somewhat recognize.  Things have changed enough since I was there so that I will just have to leave it to the kids to navigate the school the best they can since I am definitely a stranger there in a strange land.  They will do fine.  I will be the one who will continue to be lost there!  Like I always tell my kids, "It's not yo mama's high school!"