Day 7: Changes this Year

 

This one is an anticipated change that's coming up in August. After four years of homeschooling, Zoey is going back to public school to start high school. In honor of this, I'm going to do a thankful about some of the things I loved about high school.

I'm grateful for teachers and academic opportunities. Like McQueen, my high school was one of the biggest in the state. This meant that we had quite a range of classes to choose from and sometimes got really great teachers. In particular, I loved my high school English teachers and credit them for helping me learn to get technically skilled as a reader and writer while not taking away the joy and fun of either pursuit. I had an Anatomy and Physiology teacher who had us eat all kind of strange animal body parts and try to earn the "Iron Stomach Award" as we learned about the different body systems. I had social studies teachers who showed me that history can be the most exciting and relevant subject rather than the driest. I hope Zoey has some teachers who inspire.

I'm grateful for the events, like Spring Day and football games and pep rallies and the dances and the graduation ceremony. I wasn't especially into any of these things at the time, but looking back, they are special marker posts during your teen years and though they weren't the highlight of the experience for me, I'm grateful and glad they were there. I hope Zoey enjoys some of the traditional high school events.

I'm grateful for the sports and coaches. It's so helpful in high school when you find your thing, and for me this was definitely sports. On my teams, I found friendships, learned many life lessons (scattered throughout previous blog posts), and made some great memories. I got to experience both victory and defeat as intense as anything I've faced in adult life, and I found a place of belonging. I hope that Zoey is able to find an activity that excites her and gives her a place of belonging.

Most of all, I'm grateful for high school friendships. I wasn't a popular kid, but I had really great, strong, real friendships. None of us were inclined to party, so our weekends looked more like spending an hour at Blockbuster picking out a movie, driving around for hours, listening to music - and it was the absolute best. I loved my high school friends and definitely count them as the highlight of my high school experience, and I hope that Zoey makes friendships like these.