Honest Reflections — Balboa High School

Evan SooHoo
Jul 30, 2017 · 6 min read
Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/p200eric/2111513691/in/photolist-4dA4qF-4dA4st-gshtf7-gshu6A-gsiCDp-gshtCm-gsizJX-gshsL1-coqe7u licensed under Creative Commons

It wouldn’t be fair to write off Balboa High School as a joke, especially considering that it had some of the best classes I have taken. AP Computer Science was better taught than many of my college classes; the same goes for the literature class Wilcox taught, and at least three others.

That being said, this is one post I’ve been looking forward to.

When we wrote our personal statements, my first draft was essentially a giant rant about everything I disliked in high school. The advisor had absolutely no idea what I was trying to achieve, so I rewrote most of it. Seriously…what was I trying to achieve? Did I just want to get things off of my chest so that they wouldn’t bother me anymore? It’s lucky we had the chance to make multiple drafts. Writing should be constructive.

I’ll find out in this post if I learned anything from that.

Disadvantage: The Way we were Treated

This post definitely has nothing to do with anything we did in high school during a particular assembly; I’m just putting it here for decoration

I once had an appointment with my counselor, and I was yelled at by the woman at the front office as I tried to walk there. She told me off when I said I had an appointment, and only hesitated when I implied that my parent might be present (school was out; it was the day after the last). Then when I came back with a parent, she was perfectly cordial and just acted like nothing happened.

I was once yelled at for walking on the side stairs, instead of the main stairs. I was once yelled at for walking in the halls, period. These experiences would all make sense if there were clear rules I was breaking, but there weren’t. The counselor’s office was not an off-limits place. There was no rule to use the main stairs instead of the side stairs. Sometimes they just enforced things to enforce them.

Almost all of the bathrooms were constantly locked — the principal explained to our entire school that the ability to use the bathroom was a privilege. The administrators told the librarian that she couldn’t have people study in the library before school started, even when she was present. Maybe there were clear reasons, but we had no say in or explanation for any of it.

There were people like Chloe (another student), who actually took part in student government and actively worked to identify problems and try to fix them. It’s way easier, though, for me to just write a Medium post about my complaints years after said events.

Advantage: The Advantages

BalTV was full of inside jokes and probably wouldn’t make much sense to an outsider, but Aaron put his heart in it and really kept it entertaining for us

Mr. Ferraro was such a talented and effective teacher that I wanted to dedicate my next post exclusively to coding, and how the way he taught it worked (unlike many college classes that sucked by comparison). This building had some really good teachers. I don’t want to seem ungrateful for that.

Let’s take Wilcox, for example — he was good. He wasn’t perfect, but he was really, really good. He was a charismatic teacher who liked what he did, and really thought that literature had value. He held open-minded discussions. He helped people write papers that were college-level.

When I think of teachers like that (Dills, Wilcox, Binkowski…there was this one whom everyone liked and that I liked as well, but I think his teaching was a little overrated on account of how cool he was), I think of the universal experience we have when we listen to Justin Bieber. Justin Bieber, as everyone knows, is incredible. When you hear him for the first time, he unlocks a side of music that you didn’t know existed. He’s kind of like the musical equivalent of Shakespeare, and he’s easily the best thing since Tchaikovsky.

But then something terrible happens…you get used to how amazing he is and you start to take him for granted. I think that’s what happened with us and the really good teachers. We were so hung up on how we wanted to use the bathroom when we had to and leave campus during lunch periods that we started to overlook how incredibly awesome teachers like Wilcox were.

I also really liked the other students…mostly. There were these “ghosts” I didn’t like, and I’m calling them ghosts because I never saw them in the act. They would just do things. They would steal cell phones within 30 seconds. They would steal gym shorts. They would wrap gum around locks. They are probably the reason we couldn’t have nice things.

Really Conflicted

Kai was a musician (I remember his guitar pretty well) who satirized mainstream rap. On a related note, he wrote some catchy songs about chemistry and biology with Oliver and Lantow doing the beat.

So when I think about Balboa, sometimes I picture things I really liked. I picture Karen with her jar of donation money for charity (buildOn did a LOT of that kind of thing), or the APCS class helping each other to learn coding, or Ian and Kai playing their electric guitars so loudly that the power system malfunctioned. I think that we were really intelligent, creative students who demonstrated that we were willing to work hard to achieve great things.

I wish that all the teachers treated us with that in mind.

I almost got a D- on an English paper because I used the wrong method for citations (she never specified which she wanted). The grading itself seemed arbitrary — she just gave scores, and when we questioned her grading she would just condescend to us. This was a few steps up from another English teacher I had, who would base grades on (to name a few examples) the grammar we used in the first paragraph of a 2-page paper, whether or not we indented in a handwritten journal, and sometimes…nothing at all. She didn’t grade one paper, so she gave everyone 85 on it. I once saw her deduct 10% from someone’s overall grade because she forgot to bring her book.

Then there’s Wilcox, who taught and provided feedback the way a good college professor would.

I had a history teacher who, for reasons that were never explained, told me to work alone on a partner project (she told another person as well, meaning we had an even number). Then she just tore my presentation apart and still gave it the same requirements as those of two-person teams. I had a science teacher who used a curve that made no sense. The best word to describe some of the things I witnessed at Balboa is arbitrary.

Then there was Benedicto, who managed to make a class that was exceptionally good without becoming very difficult. Then there was Binkley, who once brought in a Tesla Coil he found.

I liked my favorite teachers almost as much as I disliked other ones.

Closing Thoughts

There were good times as well.

When we applied for colleges, that’s when things really started to change. Some people just wanted to get out of San Francisco, out of Balboa, out of the very idea of being in high school and not being an adult. It looked open and free, our new lives laid out before us and bound only by the greatest stretches of our imagination.

I think that Balboa was good for me — in fact, I don’t think I would have had the confidence for college if I had gone to a high school that was harder. People complain about grade inflation in college, but what about high school? Balboa was easy. Not all of the classes were easy, but most of the grading systems were.

Did it prepare us for college? Sort of…the AP classes certainly did. Would I have been able to handle Lowell, had my grades been better? Honestly, probably not at that point. The upside of Lowell, or so I hear, is that students are treated like adults, every single teacher is incredibly competent, and the entire school has absolutely no problems of its own. This is great, but my confidence was already pretty low after middle school.

We had kind-hearted people. We had good times. This was a point when a lot of new things began, and I’m glad for the memories. Now I have this post, to serve as a place to put them, and I’ve been doing my best to wrap it all up.

All of that said, going to college was quite a relief.

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