[211/366] extracurricular

[cosmolinguist]

29 What clubs, groups, or teams were you in while in high school/upper grades?

Band, and the assorted other things that went with that (marching band, jazz band and pep band), speech, basketball briefly, (knowledge bowl which is like University Challenge but not on TV), I wrote for the school paper... I think that's about it. The only one I liked was band, oh and writing for the school paper I guess but that didn't take a lot of time and I was always writing anyway.

I didn't like speech and I hated knowledge bowl with a passion but after begging my parents to let me go out for basketball in ninth grade, I found that everyone else already had a two-year head-start of skills, friends and shared experience (I had to learn the drills and the positions and the plays long after everyone else) so I was miserable and wanted to quit. My mom believed that quitting anything is inherently bad, an awful idea that's kept me in bad relationships and bad jobs and whatnot and I'm still not entirely free of its pernicious influence. So she'd only let me quit if I took up knowledge bowl instead, something I'd been shunted into in middle school as a Smart Kid but, again, hated because it was so dull and I was very lonely. I was good at it but that just got me on teams of older kids I didn't know at all who didn't like me being there.

Ugh high school is the worst.

Except band: I adored marching band especially but all of it was a way to do my favorite thing at the time, music, and be part of something bigger than myself. And it turns out the more obscure the woodwind the more I liked playing it, as in concert band I went from clarinet to bass clarinet to bassoon. I moved from clarinet to electric bass in pep band and also played bass in the jazz band, which is where I learned that boys with guitars or drum kits are The Worst (for the most part this is still true).

Comments

[silveradept]

High school really is the worst, and it's a wonder how many people manage to survive it as well as they do.

[rugessnome]

Technically I didn't get to be in any extracurriculars.

I did theater every year but one as an elective, and (...it's complicated, but boils down to: *no longer in accordance with my beliefs disclaimer* "tiny Christian private schools") tried to put out a school paper for a while before I changed schools for 10th grade.

I participated for a bit when one of my favorite teachers tried to get some kind of a cross-country ...team? going with training but it turns out I usually need to start out at the "couch" stage of C25k unless I have already recently done that, which wasn't accommodated for in the poorly organised circumstances. Plus I think it was the Hell Year I had with regard to parental health issues, so my cross-country participation was kind of a bust.

The tale of your basketball experience makes me grateful that the (closest thing we had to a) school counselor's unhelpful suggestion that I attempt to deal with sundry emotional issues (see also: Hell Year) by joining the basketball team was made impossible by my transportation arrangements. Well, mostly that anyway. Seeing as I still don't! really know how to play it!

But band, if we'd had it, probably would have been much the same experience for me, who still doesn't really know how to play an instrument :/

[cosmolinguist]

Band was an elective for me too, but it had alot of extracirricular time spent on it too. The school started us in fourth grade so people who didn't know how to read music or play instruments or whatever could start learning then. We did have some amount of lesson s on our instruments, in middle school at least and I think maybe high school a bit? I can't remember. I just remember when I got asked to play bassoon after the old bassoon player graduated, in my first lesson the band teacher showed me how to put it together and how to hold it and then said "that's all I learned in my two weeks on that in college," I guess they learned about all the instruments a little. :) "Can you go figure out how to play a scale or something?" I did. But I'd had piano lesssons sinc eI was six and guitar lessons outside of school and was by that point happy to just pick stuff up and try it out. I imagine this is why I got to play the bassoon in the first place.

[jesse_the_k]

Very impressed with your multi-instrumental flexibility -- one of the joys of youth!

[cosmolinguist]

Oh I wasn't any good at any of them! Proper jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none situation. But I had fun.

[otter]

Fun is a big reason for music in the first place.

[sfred]

The range of extracurricular stuff at American high schools always looked impossibly glamorous from over here.

I was a boy (ish) with a drum kit; I suspect I was also The Worst, at least in terms of romantic interaction.

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah it sounds lik ealot when I write it all out, but I think of myself as someone who did't do a lot of extracirriculars at school. To some extnet, this is because I didn't want to do some of them like speech or knowledge bowl. And also all of these are considered second-tier to sports, which my overprotective parents didn't allow me to do.

[otter]

Chess club and c-squad soccer and choir. But mostly I was involved in church choir, youth group and working part-time. Probably 20-25 hours a week during my junior and senior years, on top of full+ class load. With all that going on, graduated 6th in my class. I think I was manic most of that time.

[cosmolinguist]

Oh gosh, all that work and going to school makes me tired just to think about. I've been working >10 hours a week through my last year at uni and that's been more than difficult enough for me.

[otter]

The agreement with my parents when I was 14 was that they would pay tuition for the private high school ($15-1800/year iirc) and I would have a job to pay for anything else I wanted. Like my bicycle, driving lessons, clothes, entertainment (as if I had time), school supplies and activity fees. So I worked.