High School Hunger Games

 

When I look at schools today, with their carefully curated newsletters, digital attendance alerts, parent portals, PTA Facebook groups, and emergency notifications that make your phone scream like it’s being mugged — I just shake my head.

Pajama Day didn’t exist.
If you wore pajamas to school in the ’80s, someone would’ve asked if you were running away from home.

Because school in the 1980s?
Was a feral wilderness. Lawless. Beautifully unregulated.

No cell phones.
No parent emails.
No one sending “gentle reminders.”
The only reminder you got was a teacher yelling your name across the hallway like they were calling in cattle.

Parents didn’t text teachers.
Parents didn’t email teachers.
Parents didn’t communicate with teachers.
If your mother called the school office, the secretary whispered, “What happened?” like she was preparing for a crime report.

If you didn’t understand the homework, you just didn’t understand the homework.
You went to school the next day and prayed.

There was no social media drama.
If you had a problem with someone, you settled it near the bike racks using your actual vocal cords, and in my case... then run!

And the lunches?
Today’s kids have organic bento boxes with food shaped like woodland creatures.
In the 80s, we got pizza rectangles that doubled as self-defense weapons and chocolate milk that tasted like it had been filtered through a clogged radiator.

The classrooms weren’t temperature-controlled.
They had two settings:
Arctic Tundra
and
Equatorial Sweat Lodge.

But the part that still makes me laugh is how little I remember.

Some people remember every teacher, every classroom, every locker combination.

Me?

I remember:

• bad report cards
  
  

• chalk dust snowstorms
  
  

• Trapper Keepers that were more decorative than functional
  
  

• and driving my band teacher to the brink of early retirement
  
  

That’s it.

Meanwhile the 80s kids around me were out there living entire John Hughes movies—
The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles—
and I was just wandering around the hallways like a confused extra.

I wanted to be cool.
I really did.

I wanted Huey Lewis’s wardrobe—jeans, blazer, sneakers—the whole “I just rolled out of an MTV video shoot” look.

I wanted to dance like Kevin Bacon in Footloose, but I had the coordination of a newborn giraffe.

I watched Ferris Bueller and thought,
“He’s skipping school. I’m just trying to find my math class with Mr. Bruen.”

I secretly listened to Lionel Richie—softly, at a volume low enough to maintain plausible deniability—because admitting you loved “Hello” in 1986 was social suicide unless you were a girl or incredibly confident, which I was neither.

I was a back-row kid.
Not rebellious—rebellious kids had a brand.
I was just… blurry.

School was a fog of locker combinations I forgot immediately, gym-class humiliation, cafeteria smells that have never been identified by science, and overhead projectors that hummed like industrial lawnmowers.

But actual school? Plot points? Curriculum? Anything remotely academic?

Just a swirling VHS montage of confusion, hallway traffic jams, and dodgeball units that violated several Geneva Conventions.

If you told 1980s-me—the kid with the proud yellow waterproof Walkman, the off-brand Ocean Pacific T-shirt, the Sun-In hair that never quite worked, and the Lionel Richie cassette hidden under his bed—that he’d one day be in charge of thousands of students, he would have said: “Does this mean I passed?”

And the older I get, the more I see it for what it was— not an accident, not a bureaucratic oversight, not even irony.

It was God. I know Him again...

Quietly steering.
Gently nudging.
Patiently waiting for me to catch up.

Because sometimes God doesn’t start you in the front row.
Sometimes He puts you in the back—
where you can listen, where you can notice, where empathy grows in the shadows.

A life where God could finally say,

“See? I knew exactly what I was doing with you then and know exactly what you will be doing soon. Be patient”.