You know the old saying... "You can't go back to high school again."

Today, I went back to my old high school, good ole' St. Joseph Notre Dame High School of Alameda, California (and current Division IV Boys Basketball State Champions!). I always have an interesting time going back. The strangest thing about this year is that there's no students left from when I went to school. Odder still, I recognize a whole bunch of relatives of the folks I went to school with, so now it feels like one huge alternate universe where the people I knew evolved ever so slightly, but were definitely different people.

The teachers also tend to have a few more grays, but overall stay consistent. I begin to understand how they could constantly mix up our names with those of our siblings. In a school of less than 600, you know everyone, and everyone knows you, and your entire family. Such is life at St. Joe's.

I know that I'm getting older when my memories of the school become much more fond than I remember. I know that by the time I was a senior, I grew so frustrated of the structure, and how a lot of my classmates were really treated with a lot of disrespect. I also came to notice how students whose parents had strings within the PTA had a few more chances than the students who were on financial aid, most of whom were students of color. I remember the story of one student of the class after me who got expelled for mentioning the school's name on a radio station while she was talking trash about some other girl. It was worse in that she was a senior and had already gotten an acceptance letter to college. Now I agree that what she did was petty and adolescent, but geez, just ruin her college hopes for that?!? It was ironic that in our religion classes we were taught that we should follow Jesus's example and show mercy, and yet the administration wouldn't blink an eye to force a student out. You could say that my senior year was the first year I became conscious of the System, and how politics played favorites for some and screwed the rest.

At the same time, many of the same teachers and administrators from my days remain, many of whom were there when my sisters were there 7 and 11 years before me, and I've come to respect their deep and true passion for education. True, I do have concerns about some of their methods (Maybe I should give them a copy of Friere and SPEAR's Spiral Model counseling methodology. Can you say "acknowledging the student's experience"?), but their heart is in the right place, and that should count for something.

At the same time, I also get a kick out of listening in on teacher's conversations of how things REALLY work in school. It really does pay to be an outsider, and it actually does explain a bit in how the students can get so frustrated, and how the teachers can get just as frustrated. Maybe we were all in the same boat after all.

I try to tell my teachers about UCLA and how college has treated me, but it's kinda like talking to my family about school. There's so much that I want to tell them about: my friends, Samahang... my friends in Samahang. But when it comes down to it, all I tell them is that I'm doing good, my year, and my major. Such is the UCLA experience and in particular the Samahang experience; how can you describe the responsibility of reading evaluations of retention projects, making recommendations, sitting on subcommittees where you're planning to talk with UCLA administrators about academic policies and what they should be doing, plan programming for your general membership, all in the name of "positive, systemic change", not to mention that you've also found an amazing family, and the only impression you seem to make on folks is "oh, you're in a club?" Either Samahang is something a helluva lot different from anything that's out there, or UCLA truly is in its own bubble, detached from most of the real world, or maybe it's a mix of both. It reminded me of how I used to think about power structure, with administrators on the top and the students and teachers getting screwed at the bottom, and how my life at UCLA has completely changed the way I think about power. The administrators aren't all that powerful, just detached, and the students are not all that powerless, just unaware. It also reminds at how much I would like to go back and create some good ole' "positive, systemic change", and hope that the students can truly come to realize how much potential they really have.

I guess in the end, I go back to always remind myself of how far I've come, a litmus test of what my UCLA experience has really been. And I must say that I've grown so much: now I'm a little more assertive, a little less angry, a little more proactive, and a lot less fearful. I've still got a ways to go, but for four years, I don't think I've done half bad.