The American High School Experience: A Flawed Human Business

The American high school experience is as complex as we are as humans. It takes place at a time when young people are discovering who they are or who they may become. Life in high school is often made more complex as a result of family values mixing with newly discovered social values. Young people often dabble in any number of acceptable or unacceptable behavior without giving much thought to the consequences of their conduct and how it might play out in the short term or the long term for that matter.

Interestingly, because there are mainly three groups of people who are impacted by all the many variables that affect human behavior in schools, the conduct of each of these groups is described in some detail in this book. The groups are students, teachers, and parents and the crazy, silly, inspiring, comical, sometimes disgusting, unacceptable things they do. Many stories, all true, are told in this book. Daily experiences are met with reactions from kids, teachers, school administrators, and parents in ways that may seem appropriate in some cases or inappropriate, funny, or terrible in other cases. An argument can be made that while many folks in the general population expect near perfection from our public school personnel, the fact that all of us are flawed human beings interacting with each other, perfection, or anything close to it, simply is not possible.

The manner in which the author describes the reaction to each situation is a good opportunity for the reader to see the thinking behind the administrator's or the teacher's response while allowing for other possible resolutions that maybe should have been taken. The common thread in all this underscores the author's belief that while we are inherently flawed people, all can be enhanced if we focus on relationships as the key to our success when it comes to the business of humans.