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High School Phases
High School Life
High school can be a trying time for most teenagers. The ups and the downs of adolescence life is a like a never-ending roller coaster with its ups, and downs, and various tricks that happen along the way. This on-going roller coaster, however, can be broken down in to several different parts, or changes in mentality if you wish to call it thus. Through this 4 year period in which children pass through high school, there attitude's and personality can be broken down into three distinct areas. When you first start out in high school around the age of 14 or 15, you are in the safety phase. The transitional phase of high school happens between your sophomore and junior years, or the ages of 15-17, these years can be known as the trial and error phase. The final phase of high school is the anxiety phase, this roughly occurs during the students senior year, or between the ages of 17-18. After the occurrence of these three phases, children enter a new stage of their life with new phases and different beliefs and goals, the first of which being the fear phase. This occurs roughly after high school and before college, often times as well as the beginning of college.
Phase 1: The safety phase
Once students have finished their middle school education and enter into high school, they start the first phase of high school, the safety phase. During this phase, the students are exposed to more things then they ever could have fathomed in middle school, but are often times to timid to try. The freshman year is spent as an almost entirely informative year for most students. They learn what kids do to kick back and relax, they see who is popular and who is not, and they are exposed to a variety of… substances.
During this first phase, it rarely happens that the students will make friends outside of the friends they have made already in their life. They're still trying to get a feel for the new place they have entered and aren't quite ready to shake the boat all too much. The students might make friends with several seniors who feel like helping the new student learn the ropes, but they will not be the kind of friends who they will actually do things with outside of school. Most of the friends made during this first year are more like business contacts then anything else.
Habitual use of drugs and alcohol at this time is light, however, by the end of the first year, it might start becoming more and more prominent in the students general populous. At this point in their lives, several students will take up smoking.
Phase 2: Trial and Error
After the first year of high school, most people enter a trial and error stage of life. During the next two years of their existence, everything becomes and experiment to try and find what makes the person happy. During this time, the student will start to talk to more people from several different social cliches, as well as, be more comfortable doing what they enjoy doing, be it going to the movies, going to parties, etc. As well, during this time period, most students will find themselves trying more dangerous and outlandish things. Many people will try drugs, though not all will be come repeat users. During this time period, the effects that these substances might have on a person down the line are unforeseen until the next phase of a person's life. Sexually, this is the most active time for a high school teenager. During their senior year, sex becomes less and less constant as people have finished their sexual experimentation and start having serious precautions about over exposure.
As well, at this point in their lives, many people find themselves growing away from many of the friends they made during their earlier years of life. Things that they had once had in common now seem to be nothing but distant memories as people grow. However, after shedding the layers of people and going through a neo-genesis of sorts to recreate themselves, the person prepares for their third and final phase of high school life.
Phase 3: Anxiety phase
By this time in their lives, most people have set in their ways and are growing impatient with the position that they are in. The person most typically makes life effecting decisions at this point in their life as well as come face to face with the decisions they made in the earlier phases. Decisions of what a person has and has not done come back to them as they try to figure whether or not they will apply to a college or join the working force. As well, this is often a time of great effort for some as they try at a last ditch effort to try and pull themselves together for whatever the future holds for them.
By this time and point, most students are no longer making new friends and have made their final judgements on the people with whom they've attended school with for the last 3 years. The clichés of school have become less strongly reinforced as most people have grown to more rounded people by this time in their life. Despite the outward confidence that most people display at this point in their lives, there is also an inward awkwardness that occasionally shows through when a person makes a decision every once in a while.
One of the biggest parts of the anxiety phase is the want for more freedom. Most people are trying to become as self-sufficient as possible at this point in their life and try to maintain a level of freedom from their parents. However, despite the freedom and responsibility that most seniors will try to achieve, they will often find themselves talking to their parents about certain subjects in their life, money, and often times, asking for more freedom.
Drug use at this time in life is often about to reach its pinnacle for most. Within the next year or so after graduation, most people either get over drugs as a whole (excluding possibly cigarette's and alcohol) or fall victim to a crippling addiction. The time of exploration with various chemical substances has ended by this time, and typically if it has yet to start by this point in a person's life, it does not start at all.
By the end of this phase of one's life, they are preparing to take on the world. They are finally achieving all the personal freedom they wanted and are prepping for the next phase of their life.
After all this, the transition to the next section of life starts. The next section and groups of phases is that of post-college/pre-career. Having not yet reached this phase myself, I find I am unable to comment on what its like. However, having lived through the three a-fore mentioned phases without a mental breakdown, I lay in bed for the hopes that it gets a bit easier from here on out… and hopefully it will.
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