In high school, broadcast technology teacher Steve Cortez was a band geek, not athletic; his parents were divorced and he had a job since the age of nine.
“School was basic survival for me and just a matter of getting through it,” Cortez said.
Never feeling part of the school aspect of life was quite a challenge for Cortez during his high school career. As he moved to a new school for his senior year, he felt unaccepted.
Teachers agree that high school is not how it used to be. The social environment is different, the teachers’ strategies are diverse and the technology has all impacted their ideas on why high school is so different today.
“There was a lot of face-to-face interaction when I was in high school,” Cortez said. “It seems with all the technology we have today that we have started to lose communication between students and teachers a little more.”
Theater teacher Dan Schmidt enjoyed his time in high school.
“I came from a small high school, so everybody did everything together, and there weren’t many groups,” Schmidt said. “We could be who we wanted to be, and everyone was cool with that.”
Schmidt agrees that high school was considerably distinct to schooling in the year 2012.
“Students can be who they want to be here, but other forces tend to push students to where they think they should go; we have helicopter parents, outside organizations and teams pushing the student to a certain area,” Schmidt said. “[Even] with all the great technology and choices here at Blue Valley Southwest, students still feel trapped by these conditioning forces, and students need to get a voice and learn what they really want out of life and take advantage of this great school to help with that choice.”
Like Schmidt, math teacher Kimberly Spencer benefited from attending a sparsely populated school as well.
“We had a small student body, and we were all friends,” Spencer said. “I was very involved in sports and cheerleading, which made it a fun place to be.”
Spencer thinks today’s teachers have changed significantly since when she was a student.
“Teachers are much better prepared today than back when I was in school, and there is more emphasis on test scores today,” Spencer said. “Teachers today work closely together to plan good quality lessons to make the learning experience better and more meaningful for the students. When I was in school, teachers planned by themselves and did their own thing.”
English teacher Marilyn Brewer enjoyed high school, but her experience was comparatively different than that of most teachers. Brewer attended three years of high school in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands and taking corresponding work from her American school.
“High school for me was bittersweet,” Brewer said. “Although I missed my family, I had some good times at the school. Mainly I hated all the rules, especially the dress code.”
Now that Brewer is no longer a student in the classroom setting, she has recognized a change in how teachers communicate with their students.
“Teachers today are much more helpful and understanding; there was no teacher that I felt I could go to and I was far from my home with no overseas phone calls allowed — only snail mail,” Brewer said. “It was an entirely different experience than now, where we can constantly keep in touch.”
Here are individual questions teachers answered about their high school experience:
Marilyn Brewer
What is your most memorable moment from high school?
“My most memorable moment was staying in the dormitory alone for two weeks while all the other students went home for Christmas,” she said. “My parents were missionaries, and I could not go home on holidays. Another memory was going on a senior trip to Chicago, and it was wonderful. We went up on the train, stayed up all night, went sightseeing all day and slept on the train on our return. I remember the pranks. One guy had the unfortunate experience of sleeping with his mouth open, and we filled it with toothpaste. It was fun to watch him wake up.”
Steven Cortez
How was high school when you were a student similar to schooling now?
“Kids are kids,” he said. “We still have the same fears and the same insecurities. We all still question ourselves over, ‘will I be successful later in life?’”
Dan Schmidt
What did you not like about high school?
“I figured out that I should have learned to work harder and study better,” he said. “I needed to learn these skills before going to college, where I had a lot of freedom. It caught up with me during my first semester, and then I had to really work hard to get my GPA up to an acceptable level.”
Kimberly Spencer
What did you learn from your high school experience?
“I felt that when I went to college, that I wasn’t as prepared as I needed to be,” she said. “We didn’t have AP or College level classes at our high school, so I really had to teach myself how to study.”
