Wild Mouse High School

Oakhill High School has been four years of hell. Most of you seemed to have really good things to say about your experience here, but my experience has been different.

I think it goes without saying but I’ll say it anyway, COVID sucked. It stole a year of the high school experience away from all of us. A year of missed sports and plays, we couldn’t even sit together in the lunchroom. Then COVID screwed up another year of school, though it was a little closer to normal. I had to quarantine so many times during those two years, everyone around me seemed to be catching it. 

School has been like a rollercoaster, not one with fun ups and downs more like The Wild Mouse at Funtown. It’s like constant jerking into different directions, you don’t even get a rewarding drop at the end, just bruises. You’re crammed into a tiny car, the rails twist and look like you’ll fly right off, you slam into the person you’re sitting with. And you better like who you’re sitting with, or it’s gonna be a long ride.

The two years of COVID were very inconsistent, between the fact I needed to quarantine then teachers were quarantined. Random remote days, the fact that it seemed we were supposed to be in a Google Meet for remote days but didn’t get a link to join. I basically did nothing on remote days. Then throughout the four years teachers have come and gone, rules have changed, we had late start Wednesdays then we get out early now. We no longer have period four before period three on Wednesdays. I hated the constant changes, I’m trying to build habits but things keep changing.

Then the classic problem, there’s something you don’t know in class or it’s building off of something you don’t know then your teachers say “You should’ve learned this in middle school”. Or at least it was a constant issue for me. The worst thing was that others did learn it in middle school, but I didn’t. Little fun fact about me, I’m from Lewiston, I transferred to Oak Hill Middle School two weeks before COVID came to Maine. I learned very different things in Lewiston but suddenly I was just expected to know about certain way sentences are structured and how to solve certain math problems. I was fighting an uphill battle. 

Finally after two years, things were normal. Or I think it was supposed to be. Things still weren’t smooth sailing, I don’t think I knew how to be a student going to school normally. I felt like I hadn’t been a real student since 2019, then suddenly I’m a Junior, I don’t know how to be a junior. Hell, I was barely a junior, years of masking and social distancing ruined my immune system. Now I’m a senior,  am I supposed to feel different from when I first started? There’s just been so many expectations, I have to plan out my life, my career path. I have no clue what I’m doing.

I’ll get it eventually though, trial and error has worked. I’ve learned school things over the years of course; So much Shakespeare, Flip class, how not to gag when you lose milk roulette and get an expired one. But the most important thing I learned was finding my voice, advocating for what I need, asking for help when I couldn’t do things on my own. 

That’s just life, sometimes you have to figure things out for yourself, but sometimes you do have to ask for help. 

Photo by Pedro Velasco on Unsplash