Yesterday New Trier hosted a "friendly" track meet, in which 5 teams from Cook county (sorry kind of forgot which teams exactly) came and ran a non-scored race at our indoor track. In my 400 meter sprint heat, a senior at Mather High School and I had a very brief conversation about New Trier. He first pointed out the size of the New Trier field house. Here's how the conversation went for the most part:
"Damn dude this gym is at least half the size of my whole school!" he said very enthusiastically.
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| "We don't mess around, hey!" |
The conversation continued briefly and then stopped as soon as it began since we were rivals in a race about to compete against each other. The thing is, that even after the race, what he said about New Trier really got me thinking about how privileged the over roughly 4000 students currently attending New Trier are.
You can walk down any hallway, or look in any classroom and the results will be the same: you will immediately notice how unbelievable the New Trier campus is. What's more is that just under 99% of its students finish all four years of high school, and 97% go to college. Compare that to the national average of 55.5% graduating high school. That statistic is pretty amazing, but what I found very strange was that I hadn't really noticed how unbelievable the school I went to was when I was shrouded by its walls 5 days a week.
The bottom line of this post is that sometimes you don't notice how privileged you are when you are surrounded by the things you are most privileged by. I am thankful for the school I go to, and also for the kid I raced against for helping me re-realize my surroundings.
I think that it's definitely true that we should realize how privileged we actually are in going to New Trier. Ironically, today I went to my best friend's choir concert. She goes to Mundelein High School, which is much different from New Trier. Although my friend is on the level of a student at New Trier, academic wise and finance wise, she does notice, and make fun of the kind of students walking through the hallways. A significant number of those kids aren't even making it through four years of high school, let alone college, which is something that students at New Trier take as a given. I definitely feel thankful for the opportunities that have been given to me, and have taken advantage of as many as possible that have come my way.
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