General

Changing High Schools

Last week I touched on changes that come about in life and briefly explained a change I lived through as I entered high school when, as a family, we moved to a different location in the same area and school district.

Several years after that change my father took a job that landed us nearly 900 miles away from that familiar hometown area.

What a change that move produced!

The former hometown village in Ohio (population less than 500) was located in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains and the new town in Georgia (population almost 5,000) was as flat as the top of the table that my laptop is sitting on. In Ohio I drove on roads with winding steep inclines and then coasted on the downhill sections with a mix of farmland and hardwood forests on each side of those roads. In Georgia my drive was a steady, almost boring outing on straight highways flanked by tree farms filled with tall evergreen pines.

I went from attending a multi-storied school building with Art Deco features to a mid-century one story sprawling campus with several buildings linked with covered breezeways between the buildings.

Culture shock set in early.

If you were caught smoking anywhere on the Ohio school property you were suspended. Repeat offenders were expelled. The Georgia school however actually had designated areas where students were permitted to smoke cigarettes! I learned quickly that this was due to the tobacco agriculture that was so prevalent in that area. Many of those students had worked in those tobacco fields in the late summer heat and the money made from that crop supported quite a few of their families for the entire coming year.

School dress codes were strict in the Ohio school with hair length (for guys) and skirt length for girls accepted only within certain parameters. The Georgia school allowed almost anything and many students were seen wearing shorts and flip flops in nice weather. Guys had hair long enough to tie back in a ponytail and a few guys even had mustaches. I wasn’t sure whether to celebrate this newfound fashion freedom or stick with the conservative tried and true that had dominated my earlier teen years.

With the move to Georgia in high school, I had left everything and everyone that I had known since birth. The majority of my extended family lived within 50 miles of each other but living in Georgia meant I was hundreds of miles away from all of them as well as the friends that I had grown up with. I did make new friends and eventually thrived in my new school but the first year after moving was full of emotional upheaval and grief as I resisted the changes that life was bringing about. I did not adapt to change very well or very quickly at that time in my life.

Most of the changes in my life that came after the Georgia move were handled much better due to learning from my mistakes. Spending more time grieving what I had left behind instead of appreciating my new experiences meant I had less time to enjoy those new activities and friends. I tried not to make that same mistake as I moved through other changes in the coming years.

Did you experience any significant change during your teen years that you resisted?

Did your resistance make that change harder or produce more emotional upheaval like mine did?

Please share how you handled important life changes as you navigated your teen years and how that may have shaped how you handled change as you lived through your adult years.

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