I think I somehow found the best Monday college class. This is my only class on Monday, and it starts at 4 pm and ends at 7 pm. Yes, it’s technically a night class, but stay with me. The class is for my Film major, so a night class means movie screenings in class. Yes, this is a class where you come each week to watch a new movie. And I know what you might think, “Can’t I just watch this at home?”, and the answer is yes. But then you miss out on the fun of watching a movie with others. You don’t get the joy of a class where people bring snacks and blankets each week to relax on a Monday night with a movie. This specific class is “Topics in Film: High School in the Movies.” It’s literally a class focused on movies set in high school. So, think Breakfast Club, Heathers, Greece, and the movie we watched in our first class: 10 Things I Hate About You.
Now this class isn’t just about watching movies; it is also about reflecting on how these movies depict high school in the US. It is about how you relate based on your high school experience, or how your experience differed from the film that week. It is about discussing why so many films are set in high school and how high school films reflect social issues of the time they are set in.
So, for our first assignment, we wrote a reflection on our high school experiences. As a junior in college, this assignment was fascinating to me because high school feels so distant, yet it also feels like it was yesterday. It made me reflect on how I have accomplished so many of the college goals that I had set for myself in high school. I’m a Film and Political Science double major, which is exactly what I hoped I could do. I have incredible friends and the independent life I’d always dreamed of. In high school, grades, friendships, and school dances can feel like huge things, and you sometimes think that, if one thing goes wrong, the world will end. But reflecting on them in college makes them feel small and makes me feel like I’ve grown up. So, here is my extended reflection on high school.
I went to St. Michael’s Catholic Academy in Austin, Texas, for high school. It is a smaller private Catholic school with only about a hundred people per grade. Most people came from the same three middle schools and had known each other most of their lives; I only knew three people. So, at first, I felt out of my depth. I had moved schools and thought that most other kids would have done the same, but instead, I found long-standing friendships that resisted the changes of the high school transition. This dynamic made cliques form fast, but I found a good group of girls, some of whom had just moved to Texas and also felt excluded from the long-standing groups. In classes, it was easier; since cliques were divided across subjects, you could build a friendship with individuals. But at lunch and assemblies, the cliques tended to reform.
I found community in the women’s soccer team, and even though I was not a starter, the sisterhood of the squad kept me coming back each year. The seniors during my sophomore year stand out the most to me. Not only were they incredible players, but they were good people. They looked out for each other and never brought school drama to the field. They worked hard to make the team a welcoming space, and it paid off. For the first time in years, our team went to the state final. While we did not win the game, it was an incredible journey, and the accomplishment of getting so far comforted our team after the loss.
Besides sports, I developed a love for film in high school. This love started the first day of my “Introduction to Film” class when I watched Casablanca. I was hooked on the world behind the camera, and luckily, I had an incredible film teacher, Mr. D, who grew my passion for filmmaking in screenwriting, film criticism, and production classes. The incredible film department at St. Michael’s is the reason why I am a Film major. I took screenwriting, film critique, and production classes before ever applying to colleges. These experiences gave me the confidence and skills to excel as a Film major at TCU.
Besides classes and clubs, my high school experience was defined by a world event: COVID-19. COVID interrupted my freshman year of high school, taking me away from the few friends I had made during the year. During this time, I grew close with my friends, but I also grew farther from my other classmates. COVID-19 solidified the cliques that had existed, and it took until our senior year for the social effects of the pandemic to begin to disappear. During my senior year, cliques began to break apart, some ending in messy friend breakups and others in silent separation as graduation began to loom.
My senior year was a strange year for the school, as our high school merged with the middle/elementary school down the street to create one large school for K-12th. It felt like the end of an era; after all, the next year, they renamed the school (St. Michael’s Catholic Preparatory School), replaced the mascot (we went from the Crusaders to the Warriors), and started requiring uniforms for the high school. It felt like our grade got out right before it all changed, making stepping back on campus to visit for the first time after graduating feel like I was stepping into an entirely different school.
So, while my high school experience doesn’t have much in common with 10 Things I Hate About You, it does share the cliques that form from inexperience and fear and the breakdown of these cliques and expectations during senior year. It is strange to write about high school as though I were so far removed from it while, in the grand scheme of things, not being that far from it at all. It will be interesting to see what other reflections from my four years emerge in this film class.