If you think high school today is tough, try doing it without Google,
without a cellphone, and without the luxury of pretending you didn’t hear your
teacher because your earbuds were “on.” Back in 1983 at Saint Jerome’s Academy
in Bagabag, survival wasn’t a metaphor. It was a daily, sweaty, dust-covered
reality.
Let’s start with the commute. No Uber/Grab. No
group chats to coordinate rides. You walked. Sometimes kilometers. Under the
sun that didn’t care about your math exam or your half-finished homework. Rain?
You still walked. Flooded roads? You rolled up your pants and kept moving. By
the time you reached school, you already felt like you deserved a diploma.
Classrooms weren’t air-conditioned cocoons, they
were ovens with wooden desks carved by generations before you. Your “tablet”
was a notebook, your “cloud storage” was your memory, and if you forgot your
assignment at home, that was it. No emailing your teacher. No uploading to a
portal. You took the zero and moved on.
Discipline? Let’s just say it was… memorable.
Teachers didn’t negotiate. Deadlines were not “flexible,” and excuses didn’t
travel far. You learned quickly: be prepared, or be embarrassed. And
embarrassment in a small-town school? That sticks longer than any grade.
But here’s where it gets interesting, life
outside the classroom.
There was no scrolling. No endless digital
distraction. So you lived.
You played basketball on rough courts where
the lines faded but the competition didn’t. You mastered billiards, chess, and
ping-pong not through tutorials, but by losing…over and over…until you didn’t.
You knew every shortcut, every hangout spot, every sari-sari store that would
extend credit until Friday.
And yes, there were crushes. Real ones. Not
filtered through DMs or emojis. You saw them across the classroom, across the
courtyard, and you built the courage, slowly, painfully, to say something. Or
you didn’t, and just replayed that moment in your head for weeks. Passing love
letter was an art form. One wrong handoff and your entire love life became
public entertainment.
Entertainment itself was earned. Betamax
nights were events, not background noise. You watched what was available,
rewound scenes manually, and argued about who didn’t return the tape properly. Tiktik
komics were currency. You traded them, protected them, devoured them. Stories
weren’t infinite, they were treasured.
Parties? No curated playlists from streaming
apps. Someone brought a cassette, someone else brought the moves, and the rest
figured it out. Dancing wasn’t about looking cool, it was about not looking
ridiculous… which most of us failed at anyway.
And here’s the part that today’s generation
might struggle to understand: boredom existed…and it made you better.
When there was nothing to do, you thought. You
talked. You created games out of thin air. You built friendships that weren’t
maintained by notifications but by presence. You learned to sit with
discomfort, to solve problems without instantly searching for answers, to rely
on people instead of platforms.
That era shaped something different.
It built resilience. You couldn’t hide behind
a screen, so you faced things, teachers, failures, rejections, dumped, denied head-on.
It built social intelligence. You read faces, tones, silences. It built
patience. Not everything came instantly, and because of that, everything meant
more.
But let’s not romanticize it blindly.
Information was hard to access. Mistakes were
harder to fix. Opportunities weren’t as visible. If you didn’t know something,
you really didn’t know it until you found the right book or the right person.
Today’s tools remove those barriers…and that’s a good thing.
Still, something was lost in the trade.
Today is faster, smarter, more connected. But
it’s also noisier, more distracted, and strangely more isolating. Back then,
your world was smaller…but you were deeply in it.
So no…you probably wouldn’t “survive” high
school in the 1980s the way we did.
Not because it was harder in every way, but
because it demanded a different kind of toughness. The kind you don’t download.
The kind you build….step by step, walk by walk, mistake by mistake.
And if you did survive?
You didn’t just graduate.
You
grew up… and you become a Legend. GOAT
