Newcomers Deserve Kindness, Not Cruelty

As we near the last few weeks of school, I find myself reflecting more often on my first year at Campolindo, including some of the changes I want to see for the next freshman class.

Here is my advice for the class of 2020:

My first day got off to a rocky start. I switched lockers, tried (and failed) at memorizing the names of my new classmates, and had to adjust to the fact that my group of friends had changed dramatically.

To make matters worse, I earned a big fat “D” on my first English essay. I was not prepared for the tougher standards of high school.

Eventually though, I settled down, and by the end of the first quarter I started to manage myself and my time better. After school was tennis, after tennis was dinner, and after dinner was homework – and the cycle repeated.

The one-day crash course all incoming freshman experience is tough. While everything about the first weeks of school seem centered around helping the freshman, even with counselor visits, Senior buddies and campus maps, I still found myself lost on the first day.

My head was spinning. Who was this teacher? What was the quad? C-pack? Did this make sense to everyone but me?

But the real problem wasn’t a difficult class or a lack of friends, it was the way the upperclassmen responded to the 9th graders as a whole. At the first rally, a good-old fashioned “freshman shaming” took place as my peers were booed by hundreds of older students. This set the tone for the rest of the year.

I knew it was a joke, but being put down simply because we were new to the school seemed like an unnecessary evil.

My friends were similarly distraught by the cold welcome, and yet now many of them plan to turn around and abuse the new crop of students who will be setting foot on campus for the first time next fall.

“When I’m a sophomore next year, I’m going to do the same thing to the new freshmen,” one of my friends reported.

Why would we do this?  Why would we be so unfriendly to those students most in need of support? Is it really just because that’s how we were treated in the beginning too? I’m starting to think so.  I’m beginning to understand that abuse is learned and cycles are established because humans are wired to repeat what they experience.

Yet, we also have the power to break such patterns of behavior.  Emerson said that “foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”  Just because something is called a tradition doesn’t make it right.

Let’s be better people. We were all freshmen once. I bet you still cringe at some of the memories.

Let’s give the class of 2020 a warmer welcome. We only have 4 years of high school.  It’s a shame to think people would go out of their way to make one of them “the worst” for someone else.