1. You will be judged
This will be difficult for you to understand, because you were dux of your primary school, but grading is a dangerous thing. Grading is all about determining your place in the system. It's not about testing your skills, it's not about making sure the teacher has taught everything they need to - it's about you being placed in the middle third and you learning to accept it. You will learn that the people doing the judging - the strangers that are paid to teach you - don't really deserve your respect. This is another lesson you will need to learn - respect is something that is earned through a shared appreciation of 'what makes sense' - but we can chat about that later.
You will learn that being judged isn't fair. You will learn that the subjects you should enjoy the most - the ones where you are able to express your creative side - will be the ones you dislike the most because of this judgement. You won't understand why others get better marks in Art, English, Woodwork or Food Tech. To be honest, noone will be able to give you a satisfactory answer - especially not your teachers - because it all comes down to the subconscious need for schools to produce the elite few leaders who can be trained to give the acceptably correct answers. This is probably going over your head at the moment...
This is the point: you need to learn that you are the only capable judge of your own work and everyone else can suck it.
2. You won't get to choose what you want to learn
You will be given tiny tastes of everything you are exposed to in the six years you are in high school. This will be an infinitesimal amount compared to the breadth and depth of human knowledge. You won't get any say in any of the brief touches you have with learning. For some reason, and you will not be able to find the answer anywhere, the high schools you could access all run with four Terms a year, with each Term for each subject broken into different topics to study. You may spend five weeks in Year 9 looking at Poetry. Now, do not be fooled. Poetry is brilliant. You will not think so. This is because you are forced to learn particular poems in a particular way. Each poem has an answer that you will not understand or agree with. Don't worry - you will come back to poetry.
Now, each Term is broken into topics, each subject requires a certain number of topics to be covered, and they will all be disconnected and no two subjects will look at similar topics at the same time. So you will jump from Poetry to Newspaper Articles to Short Stories to Drama, and each new topic will be five weeks (well, maybe fifteen hours at most) and have nothing to do with the other topics. This is because teachers need to keep you from getting comfortable because if you get comfortable you will muck-up (you won't, but let's pretend you will). You will, at some point, study Macbeth in English. The same year, you will briefly look at Medieval England in History. This will not be at the same time so you will have to 'learn' the same thing again and it will get boring. This is because teachers don't talk to each other about teaching - they talk to each other about drinking.
Oh, remember all that Australian History you studied in Primary? Be prepared to repeat it at least four more times. Don't worry though, you won't remember or care about any of it.
This is all because what you are forced to learn will be dictated by Very Important People, who answer to other Very Important People, who make policies based on what the Daily Telegraph decides is the latest thing 'failing our kids/nation'. Do not blame your teachers for trying to teach you boring things as they feel they are forced to. However, feel free to blame your teachers for not taking a chance and throwing their curriculum out the window.
Much later on, the internet will take off and you will spend hours browsing wikipedia, following links and reading about thousands of fascinating things. You will wish that school was like this and that you could've spent a full year learning how to do valuable, interesting things, like writing a novel (English/Art/History) or constructing a siege machine (History/Industrial Tech/Maths). You will wish you could teach this way. Hopefully one day you will be able to...
3. The only mementos you'll have will be fading reports and school books with ridiculous covers
In your six years of being educated at in high school, you will create:
- One can crusher
- One wooden car
- One unfinished stuffed elephant
- Numerous items of food that you will then eat and really like and won't get good marks for
- One collection of outrageous poems, including one about the music teacher turning into a dragon and terrorising the school - this one poem will be 25 pages of jarring rhyme and you'll love it
- An extraordinary amount of assignments, essays and homework
