You Wouldn't Survive SJA High School in the 1980's

2nd Year 1984

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