Private Versus Public – Final Analysis

In the middle of my seventh grade year, due to financial reasons, my family and I moved back to Middleburg, and my mother decided she wanted me to attend my old private school. I was nervous and excited to see everyone I had left behind so many years earlier.

Almost every single person from my Kindergarten class was still there, with only a few new additions. I remember my first day, how strange it was to be with all these people who I hadn’t known, people who had essentially shunned me. It was the first time in my life I wasn’t able to join seamlessly into the fray. I felt lonely. And I felt poor. Worst of all, I felt inferior.

I decided social interaction was overrated and excelled in school. My public school education had put me in the top of my class at private school and a lot of the time, I was bored and felt like the teachers coddled us. For example, we had two sets of grades on our report cards: Effort (how hard it seemed you were trying) and Achievement (the actual quality of your papers and your test scores). Effort? Are you kidding me? The most hilarious part was that placement on honor roll was determined by Effort grades. Needless to say, I often got better Achievement grades than Effort grades.

Another notable thing about being an adolescent at my private school was the amount of drama. I hate to generalize (actually, I kind of love it), but when you are rich and have nothing to worry about, you create things to worry about. Firstly, our class in particular was very into theatre; we put on two class plays whereas most other classes had only put on one (it was a tradition to do an eighth grade play and it was a big deal).

Most of these kids had been together for ten years, and so inter-class dating was pure comedy. The relationships seemed almost incestuous and the second some girl gave her first blow job or some guy tried to kiss a seventh grader, the entire class would know. There were suicide attempts (cry for attention), class-wide pranks (cry for attention), and dramatic break-ups and affairs (attention, attention, attention). One time we had an assignment in Latin class to write a tragedy in Latin and three would be picked to be performed.