The First Week of High School

Newsletter 2024-08-11

My daughter is in high school. Let me try that again. MY DAUGHTER IS IN HIGH SCHOOL. My first attempt didn’t quite capture the dire nature of the situation. I had an inkling this was coming. There had to be something after eighth grade, but why did it have to be this? My fourteen-year-old, Betsy, has now completed her first week of big-time education. This is the era where everything isn’t made up and the points do matter. Her actions over the next four years will determine where she goes to college and what career she eventually has—if any. Running away to live alone in the woods is still an option. The increased pressure comes at the worst possible time. She’s dealing with new teachers, new coaches, new friends, and that whole puberty thing. I’d be absolutely useless if I was under attack by new and confusing cocktails of hormones every day. You should see how I do with regular cocktails. I’m not getting anything done for a week after my second Long Island iced tea. Betsy has now run that educational, social, and biological gauntlet for a full seven days. Here’s the state of the war so far.

I knew we were in trouble as soon as we took the tour. In the final days of the summer, the school had an open house for the kids to find their classrooms and collect their iPads. Back in my day, all electronic devices were locked in a special room called a computer lab, where science wizards taught us to use cutting edge technology like Excel and Microsoft Word. Now, students are supposed to be logged in and up-to-date on all their personal school-issued devices before the first day of class. Betsy had an easy time navigating the iPad login and account updates. I was powerless to help. I exclusively use Android products. My one Apple purchase, an Apple TV+ subscription, caused me nothing but grief. It required me to reset my account every other time I used it to prove I wasn’t a thief. The ghost of Steve Jobs knew I had too many kids to be able to afford nice things. Betsy has none of my one-way feuds with major technology companies. Her grades—and her future—depend on her playing nice with Apple’s entire product line. Not that these iPads are anything approaching new. Betsy goes to a public school. These are the same iPads kids were using the day Lincoln was shot. Welcome to the most first world of all first-world problems. My child’s personal handheld computer, which she was given for free, isn’t as fast as I would like it to be. My mom was born in the house without indoor plumbing. Humanity has come a long way. Too bad I’ve adjusted to the hedonic treadmill and developed an insufferable sense of entitlement. Last year, I tried to help Betsy proofread a paper she was writing. I quit in a fit of rage one paragraph in because the cursor was too slow. If I had to write newsletters on that device, I’d drink Long Island iced teas until I became illiterate.

The self-guided tour is when I realized we weren’t in Kansas anymore. I went to a Catholic high School with two hundred kids. My daughter is going to a public one with more than a thousand. For reference, that’s the same size as my college. The massive headcount and public tax dollars give Betsy’s high school amenities mine never had, like a pool and air conditioning. Going without climate control wasn’t all bad. A few times a year, we got out of school early so that people didn’t die from heat stroke. No one needed help to navigate my school. You could blindfold yourself and spin in circles and still find your way anywhere in thirty seconds or less. To track down Betsy’s classes, we needed an actual map. For once, my old-timey skills came in handy. Betsy couldn’t figure out how to orient the map. I grabbed the flimsy sheet of paper and guided us to the Spanish room like an ancient mariner navigating with a sextant. Thanks to my expert guidance, we avoided sailing off the edge of the world or running into any dragons.

All of her classes are a considerable distance apart. She’ll easily get ten thousand steps a day, as measured by the other, smaller personal computer she’ll also have with her. We really are living in the future. Too bad that includes a fear of technology. Indiana passed a law that says students can’t have their phones in school. At the start of every class, kids have to turn in their phones at the door like cowboys checking their guns at a saloon. I understand the need to eliminate distractions, but it will be hard for Betsy to remember to turn her phone in and get it back six separate times a day. If I put mine down in a slightly different place than usual, it’s simply gone for the week. I’m at the age where if I don’t want to lose something, I need to physically tether it to my body. Forget wallet chains. I need a phone leash.

I’m not the only one with memory problems. Betsy was less than an hour into her first day of school before I got a frantic text message that she left something at home. She was supposed to read a biography over the summer. It was the one and only book she was responsible for bringing on the first day. It was still sitting on the desk in her room. At first, I wasn’t going to bring it. The school isn’t far away, but I felt like it would set a bad precedent if I bailed her out immediately rather than requiring her to be more responsible. That lasted all of thirty seconds. I caved in and dropped off the book at the office. She learned her lesson, by which I mean she forgot something the second day as well. That time, it was her clothes for cross country practice, which starts immediately after school. My wife Lola handled that drop-off on her way to work. It was quite a start to the school year. Back in my day, if you forgot something and you wanted your mom to drive it to school, you had to make the walk of shame to the office to use the phone there. If your mom wasn’t home when you called, you were out of luck. Having your parents always be instantly reachable is like being a child in easy mode. Well, always being reachable when Betsy’s phone isn’t quarantined in a pouch at the front of the classroom. I look forward to her forgetting it there sometime when she absolutely has to have it overnight. Breaking into the school should be fun. Pass the grappling hook.

Photo by Ivan Aleksic on Unsplash

Academics aren’t the only area where the stakes are higher. The same goes for sports. I had to attend an all-parents meeting where the athletic director hit us with some hard truths. He talked about how your kid might not have a spot on a team anymore because our suburb is growing. Super athletes who have been on traveling teams since birth could move to town at any moment. Then he hit us with the opposite truth and told us that level of skill is pointless. In his twenty-seven years administering high school, he’s seen two kids get full ride athletic scholarships. Everybody else gets partial money to a small school they didn’t really want to go to. The kids usually drop the sport and the college after the first year. The firehose of pessimism made the athletic director my new best friend. If only he knew I exist.

All of that was largely irrelevant for my family. I didn’t give Betsy any superhuman athletic genes. I barely gave her regular genes. She should count herself lucky that she has the right number of fingers and toes. I did track and cross country in college, but it was only Division II and I was just a walk-on. In hindsight, I wish I would have opted out of college sports. It used up my free time and joint cartilage while only keeping me in running shape, which is the most useless form of fitness. There’s nothing worse for a guy than looking small, weak, and capable of fleeing danger.  I’m lucky Lola married me for my personality. I’ve already told Betsy that even if she becomes an amazing athlete, I still don’t want her doing sports in college. She’s on board with that. She would simply like to get to college at all. That’s a much more realistic goal that I can get behind. The key to good parenting is crushing your child’s biggest dreams early. Then achieving the smaller ones seems like a win.

Entering college and abandoning sports is still in the not-so-distant future. For now, Betsy takes high school athletics very seriously, which is the only way they can be taken if you want to stay on the team. Her cross country squad had practices all summer. The biggest development there wasn’t that Betsy got faster, but that she got to practice herself. In one of the few acts of tough love that I actually followed through on, I made her ride her bike to practice every morning. I never knew when they would be done, and being perpetually available to pick her up was disproportionately inconvenient. Besides, she rode her bike all over town to see her friends. There was no reason she couldn’t travel less than a mile under her own power to and from practice. When the school year started, I thought I’d be stuck driving her again. She takes the bus to school, so she doesn’t have her bike with her to get home after practice. The first day, she texted me when practice was over. I texted her back right away that I was enroute. When I got there, she was the last kid at practice, waiting alone with the coach like she’d been abandoned on the side of the road. I’m surprised there wasn’t a Sarah McLachlan song playing in the background. I asked her how she could possibly be the last kid there when I left home to get her within a minute of her message. She said that the other kids drove themselves home or rode with friends. They offered to drop her off but she declined because I’d already said I was on the way. I was punished by my own promptness. Procrastination would have saved the day. I made it crystal clear I want her to get a ride home if one is available. It’s a whole new era. She can sign up for all the activities she wants if she can find her way back by liberally mooching from her slightly older teammates. That’s what friends are for. 

Soon enough, Betsy will be able to return the favor. She’s less than a year from being old enough to get her driver’s permit. She’s extremely apprehensive about that prospect. My plan is still to take her to a golf course and let her drive me around in a cart as I hopelessly chase a ball for nine or eighteen holes. I offered to do it one day this summer, but it ended up being inordinately hot. Also, it was a morning when Betsy didn’t have cross country practice, so she couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed before noon. I dream of the day when she has an old, used car and she can handle the rest of high school on her own. Except for when she forgets two to five items a week and I have to drive them to her because she’s not allowed to leave the building in the middle of the day. She still needs me after all, if only for a little while longer. I better enjoy it while it lasts. 

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time. 

James