High School Reunion Research Articles

What qualities do lifelong friends and good leaders have in common?

Earlier this summer I traveled to Lake Athens, Texas, just outside Dallas, for another gathering of five high school friends. We graduated high school together and set about earning college degrees, building careers, marrying, and raising children. We kept up with each other here and there, but for the most part, we lived separate lives. With the advent of Facebook, we all reconnected. In 2015, with careers firmly established and children raised and gone, we decided to have our own little high school reunion at a lake house belonging to one of the friends. We’ve met up six times since then. We also did weekly Zoom calls during the pandemic and set up a group text. We communicate with each other often.

What qualities do lifelong friends and good leaders have in common?

Earlier this summer I traveled to Lake Athens, Texas, just outside Dallas, for another gathering of five high school friends. We graduated high school together and set about earning college degrees, building careers, marrying, and raising children. We kept up with each other here and there, but for the most part, we lived separate lives. With the advent of Facebook, we all reconnected. In 2015, with careers firmly established and children raised and gone, we decided to have our own little high school reunion at a lake house belonging to one of the friends. We’ve met up six times since then. We also did weekly Zoom calls during the pandemic and set up a group text. We communicate with each other often.

An Interview with Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist, Farah Stockman

An Interview with Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist, Farah Stockman Jon K. Lauck and Farah Stockman Tell us about your roots in the American Midwest. I was raised in East Lansing, Michigan. Both of my parents taught at Michigan State University, and they still live in Okemos, Michigan. My dad is a big outdoorsman, so I grew up around rivers, particularly the Au Sable. Watching the canoe marathon in Grayling, Michigan, is a big family affair. My sister and her husband attended the University of Michigan. I also have a lot of cousins in Detroit. A whole branch of my mother's family moved up from Mississippi to Detroit during the Jim Crow era to work in the auto plants, and they still live there now. Many of my cousins work two or even three jobs to get by. My husband spent some time working at Albion College, so we spent time on a dairy farm nearby. Albion had some sizable factories that closed down, and the town has never really recovered. It brought home the themes of the book. What was your sense of the Midwest as a region when you were growing up? In many ways I had an idyllic childhood, growing up in a college town that had poetry readings and plenty of international flavor, in the form of graduate students at MSU and restaurants. But I didn't really appreciate it when I was a kid. I wanted to see the world and get out from under my parents. I went away to college at age eighteen and eventually went to live on the other side of the world, in Kenya and Tanzania, which felt very exciting. It was only years later, when organizing my high school reunions, that I realized how many of my friends were moving back because Michigan is affordable, with a high quality of life. Through the [End Page 109] pandemic, my parents helped take care of my daughter when we lost our childcare, so I spent an extended time in Michigan. And now I'm finding myself spending more and more time there and appreciating it in a way that I never did as a child. What did your parents teach at MSU and how did they get into those fields? My parents taught at Michigan State for much of their professional careers. My dad taught in the computer science department, and my mom taught in the communicative sciences and disorders department. My dad descended from Italian and German immigrant grandparents. His mom was a dressmaker for a time. His father directed the Henry George School in Philadelphia. My dad grew up in Trevose, Pennsylvania, where his math brain and general charisma took him to college despite the fact that his family had little money. My mother, an African American descendent of slaves in the U.S., grew up in Winona, Mississippi, during the Jim Crow era. Her parents taught at schools for Black children. Her father was also a preacher who tutored Black veterans at night. At the time, career choices for Black women were severely constrained. Had my mother gone to college today, she might have been an opera singer or an architect. But back then it was questionable whether a Black female architect would find employment. Speech pathology was one of the few professional fields open to Black women. She left Mississippi for graduate school and never looked back. Afterwards, she did a teaching stint at Jackson State University and later at Howard University, where some of her research focused on infant speech acquisition, using her own child (me) as one of her subjects. How did you decide to focus on a plant in Indianapolis to tell the story in American Made? On election night in 2016, I was stunned to see so many of my fellow Americans cast their ballots for a man who had never served even one day in government. How could that be? I asked around: Why Donald Trump? If I asked people from my home state of Michigan, I often heard one refrain: "He's going to bring back our jobs. He's going to bring the factories back." Trump had a routine at...

When every day is a high school reunion: Social media comparisons and self-esteem.

Although past research has shown that social comparisons made through social media contribute to negative outcomes, little is known about the nature of these comparisons (domains, direction, and extremity), variables that determine comparison outcomes (post valence, perceiver's self-esteem), and how these comparisons differ from those made in other contexts (e.g., text messages, face-to-face interactions). In 4 studies (N = 798), we provide the first comprehensive analysis of how individuals make and respond to social comparisons on social media, using comparisons made in real-time while browsing news feeds (Study 1), experimenter-generated comparisons (Study 2), and comparisons made on social media versus in other contexts (Studies 3 and 4). More frequent and more extreme upward comparisons resulted in immediate declines in self-evaluations as well as cumulative negative effects on individuals' state self-esteem, mood, and life satisfaction after a social media browsing session. Moreover, downward and lateral comparisons occurred less frequently and did little to mitigate upward comparisons' negative effects. Furthermore, low self-esteem individuals were particularly vulnerable to making more frequent and more extreme upward comparisons on social media, which in turn threatened their already-lower self-evaluations. Finally, social media comparisons resulted in greater declines in self-evaluations than those made in other contexts. Together, these studies provide the first insights into the cumulative impact of multiple comparisons, clarify the role of self-esteem in online comparison processes, and demonstrate how the characteristics and impact of comparisons on social media differ from those made in other contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Supplemental Material for When Every Day Is a High School Reunion: Social Media Comparisons and Self-Esteem

Supplemental Material for When Every Day Is a High School Reunion: Social Media Comparisons and Self-Esteem

The Chasers by Renato Rosaldo

Reviewed by: The Chasers by Renato Rosaldo Alex E. Chávez Renato Rosaldo. The Chasers. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. 144 pp. Renato Rosaldo. The Chasers. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. 144 pp. In a recent radio interview on the topic of his book of poetry, The Chasers, Renato Rosaldo remarked, "There is a subtext in this text. The book could be called—if it were just focused on me, which it's not—'the making of an anthropologist.' There is a lot of close observation." Following these words, Rosaldo moved on to tell of the transnational and bi-cultural world of his upbringing chronicled in The Chasers—Mexican father and Anglo mother with roots along the circum-Caribbean of Veracruz, Mexico and the US Midwestern heartland, respectively. Two worlds seemingly distant, yet both intimately at home in him, though often in contradiction—the fault lines lived along the divides of language, culture, and race. Reflecting on his move to the US Southwest after spending his early childhood in Wisconsin, he writes in the poem "Not from Tucson": A new friend calls Mexicans dirty, looks my way, says he doesn't mean me. I see what I'm up against, where I have to stand, decide I must re-learn Spanish, must become Mexican-American. (55) These experiences cultivated in Rosaldo a keen sense of bearing witness, of understanding and grappling with difference—all necessary for conducting good ethnography. These experiences, as he comments, prepared him for a life of anthropological inquiry, at the heart of which has been critical attention to liminal spaces and the lived experiences of allegorical social divides, or what he refers to in his work as the "borderlands." [End Page 807] This analytic, however, is also a literal placial reference to the complexities of living along the US–Mexico border region. At the crossroads of poetry, prose, and anthropology, The Chasers offers an historical auto-ethnographic glimpse of life on the borderlands of nations and cultures, chronicling Rosaldo's deep and formative experiences of growing up in Tucson, Arizona and those of his twelve Mexican American Tucson High School friends—a group known as the Chasers (1956–1959)—as they came of age, graduated, and fell out of touch. Sourced from memory and interviews with the Chasers following their fiftieth high school reunion, Rosaldo's prose poetry offers up a collective, multi-layered portrait of borderlands living—crossing between identities, languages, and institutions over decades. He evocatively assembles events, stories, and descriptions with ethnographic acumen and poetic intuition, or as he writes in "Never Chicano Enough": Can't sort what I invented from what I remember or what I lived—who we were, what we did. (5) This work begs us to consider how creative genres allow us to rethink the possibilities of ethnographic narrative within the context of anthropological research. In other words—and with further specificity—what is the relationship between ethnography and poetry? And what might ethnography bring to poetry and vice versa as forms that lend attention to the senses, while attending to certain conventions about structure and genre? Indeed, anthropology has long been preoccupied with poetry in one way or another. From Boas's discussion of the importance of investigating poetry in Introduction to the Handbook of American Indian Languages (1911) to Sapir's (1921) emphasis on the role of sound and aesthetics in poetic practice; from Zora Neale Hurston's (1935) creative play with genres and poetics in her own ethnographic practice, to the ethnopoetic analysis of Tedlock (1983) and Hymes (1981); and most certainly the work of Bauman (1984) and Feld (1982) on performativity, genre, interdiscursivity, and the voice. And yet, it seems anthropologists have often kept their own poetic voices hidden—Ruth Benedict comes to mind, who published her poetry under pseudonyms as a way of concealing it from her anthropology colleagues. While an object of analysis, poetry has traditionally been accepted less as a mode of ethnographic writing. Presently, however, lyrical [End Page 808] prose is more commonplace within anthropology, in part, due to the pioneering work of Rosaldo. Writing poetry with an ethnographic sensibility is not new for Rosaldo. In 2013, he published The Day...

The Roots of Optimism

Starting high school is hard. One ninth grader recently described seeing her old middle school friends walk by her in the hallway “without a hi or a smile.” “I felt invisible,” she told me. To kids, minor incidents like this can seem like a sign of more bad things to come. As another teen said to me: “It makes me feel like I won't have any friends at my high school reunion.” As a scientist, I want to help kids stay optimistic during tough transitions in life. We've learned that if kids think that you can't change the kind of person you are—a “bully” or a “victim,” a “good” person or a “bad” one—then they believe small difficulties predict the rest of their life.

Planning for the Future: Savings and Retirement

Marcy and Dan were high school sweethearts who married young and built a life together. Between Marcy's work as a waitress and Dan's as an electrician, they have raised their now-teenage children with a lot of hard work and sacrifice. While at lunch with a group of friends, Marcy hears about her friend Diane's mother, who, due to a lifetime of poor financial planning, has had to move in with Diane, putting a strain on Diane's finances and marriage. While saddened to hear about her friend's misfortunes, Marcy realizes she needs to consider her and Dan's future and their lack of retirement savings. She and Dan meet with a financial planner for help with retirement planning, and they learn about their options for saving and investing. Excerpt UVA-F-1869 Aug. 9, 2019 Planning for the Future: Savings and Retirement Introduction Marcy enjoyed her monthly lunches with her friends. She ordered another glass of wine as the conversation moved from the challenges of raising teenage children to the large list of “to-dos” that never seemed to end. This was their fifth lunch gathering since they had all decided after their 20th high school reunion to meet more regularly. With all the demands of their lives—marriages, kids, jobs—they did not see each other often enough, and their regular lunches kept them close and in touch. Marcy found great comfort in these get-togethers, and she welcomed the break from her daily routine. After marrying her high school sweetheart, Dan, she had spent 18 years as a stay-at-home mom. She had also taken online college courses to get a bachelor's degree in elementary education and worked as an IHOP waitress when money was tight. Together with Dan's work as an electrician, they were able to raise three teenage children, but it had taken hard work and sacrifice. Now, she and Dan were more financially secure than they had been when they were first married. With her current job as a substitute teacher, Marcy finally felt that she could indulge herself with a nice lunch with her friends. . . .

Conversational Code-Switching among Bilinguals in Junior High School Reunion Event

The goal of this research was to find out the types of code-switching, and the reason of the participants performs code-switching in the conversation. Research used a qualitative approach. The result shows that three types of code-switching occurs in the conversation among bilingual in the junior high school reunion, they are intra-sentential mixing, intra-lexical code mixing, involving a change of pronunciation. The functions of codeswitching usage are as the marker of changing topic, to show their closeness as an old friend, and to show the close relationship among others. The close relationship between the speakers makes the feel free to switch from one language to another. Furthermore, the switching code also has another function as repetition is used to clarify the utterances of by the speakers. Moreover, the code-switching in the conversation are able to declare the excitement feeling towards a particular topic (the interesting topic) that they are talking about.

Here Comes Arialia

Here Comes Arialia Alia Volz (bio) We were early birds, bad girls, schemers, druggies. Aria and I only attended high school as freshmen; after that, we were independent study kids. While Analy High’s class of ’96 amassed memories to chronicle in yearbooks, we skulked around our small California town, smoking weed and later meth, hitchhiking, getting fucked up with grown men. We skipped prom, school pictures, and graduation. So when Aria calls to talk me into our ten-year high school reunion, I assume she’s joking. Aria lives on the East Coast, whereas I’ve recently returned to San Francisco, an hour south of our former stomping grounds. Now she wants to fly cross-country for the reunion of a high school we barely attended. It’s absurd. But the promise of a visit from my old partner in crime is enough to get me interested. “You realize we’re not going to know anybody,” I say. “I know,” she laugh-screams. “That’s the whole fucking point.” [End Page 149] One morning in freshman homeroom, Mandy Chapman twisted around in her seat and whispered, “Dude, are you stoned? Your eyes are so red.” She was a pretty tomboy with uncanny social ease, the kind of girl who could casually penetrate any clique. I wasn’t stoned, just suffering hay fever, but I lied and said yes. Back then I was the friendless wonder. Chubby, freckled, and frizzy-haired. Neither a drama geek, nor a science geek, nor a math geek, but a generalized dork: someone who always wore outdated styles, suffered snot-producing allergies, discovered deodorant late in puberty, and blurted the right answer too often in class. I would’ve been every teacher’s pet had teachers not found me irritating. “I’m calling you ‘Stoney’ from now on,” Mandy said. “That’s totally your handle.” It was the first nickname I’d ever been given that wasn’t cruel. “Hey, Stoney,” Mandy said, later that week. “I have to introduce you to Aria. You guys are like twins.” My heart bounded, both because Mandy thought I was worth introducing to someone, and because, as an only child and social pariah, the idea of twinship was foreign and dreamy. Aria was all angles: dramatic cheekbones, pointed chin, jaunty walk. She wore an asymmetrical bob, short in back, with blond tips that sliced across her jawline. There was no fat on her body. Her full lips wore a permanent sneer. “What’s up, Alia?” Aria said. “That’s an even bigger hippie name than mine.” Mandy flashed a Cheshire grin. “There you go, dudes. Thank me later.” Alia and Aria. Aria and Alia. We were both products of broken hippie families, both too bright to be happy. We lived on the same street, a meandering pastoral stretch so nowhere they actually named it Blank Road. Our single moms both sold weed to pay rent. Pot had supported my family since before my birth. I grew up [End Page 150] knowing that if I ever blabbed about “the biz,” my parents would go to prison and I’d become a ward of the state. So I resisted the urge to bring a bud the size of my forearm for kindergarten Show and Tell. In elementary school, I recited the D.A.R.E to Keep Kids off Drugs commandments with crossed fingers tucked into the sleeves of my sweatshirt. After my parents divorced when I was nine, I went mum during sessions with a child therapist. When people asked what my mom did for a living, I said she was an artist—a true statement, just incomplete. With Aria, there was no need to lie. Before long, we were not only smoking pot together, but also with each other’s moms. It felt natural, like I had found my long-lost sister. She’d been out there all along, living a parallel life. Our shared language grew so thick with inside jokes that even other teens couldn’t follow the thread. Kids at school mashed our names together: Here comes Arialia. In the weeks leading up to the reunion, Aria forwards me emails from the organizer, a girl...

A High School Reunion

From the Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, St. Mary’s Hospital, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Correspondence to: Joe Dylewski, MD, Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, St. Mary’s Hospital, 3830 Lacombe, Montreal, Quebec, H3T 1M5, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]. The author has no funding or conflicts of interest to disclose.

What the White Girl Asked at Our 20<sup>th</sup> High School Reunion

What the White Girl Asked at Our 20<sup>th</sup> High School Reunion

Over the Rainbow.

Over the Rainbow.

Death, Determination and “the end of ends?”: Nathan Zuckerman from <em>My Life as a Man</em> to <em>Exit Ghost</em>

You must not come to nothing! Make something of yourselves!-American PastoralNow, where is he that will not stay so longTill his friend sickness hath me?-Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2In American Pastoral (1997), Nathan Zuckerman attends his high school reunion, forty-five years after graduation. He returns home that night too excited for sleep and composes an eloquent, kinetic speech that evokes postwar exhilaration of his teenage years-a personal, and national creation myth:1 Around us nothing was lifeless. Sacrifice and constraint were over. Depression had disappeared. Everything was motion. lid was off. Americans were to start over again, en masse, everyone it together (Pastoral 40). This vision of Newark, New Jersey, and its Jewish microcosm is, according to section's title, a Paradise Remembered. Zuckerman recalls a second genesis, ignited by spark us, and powered by an American upsurge of which illuminated Weequahic neighborhood, bright with industriousness (44, 40, 41). National aspirations found an especially pure and intense expression communal determination that we, children, should escape poverty, ignorance, disease, social injury and intimidation-escape, above all, insignificance (41; italics added). To live is to act with purpose: We had new means and new ends, new allegiances and new aims; The goal was to have goals, aim was to have (44, 41; italics original).Years later, Zuckerman surveys unpredictable results of all that drive. Some students attained success towards which they were steered relentlessly: a boy who worked his father's dry cleaning store has been transformed into a judge; an aspiring juvenile delinquent has resisted, somehow, gravitational pull of jail house to become a restaurateur (41). But who could have foreseen that charmed trajectory of school's athletic golden boy would be destabilized by a fatal act of 1960s domestic terrorism (20)? Though these paths are unpredictable, Zuckerman's focus shifts almost imperceptibly to an inevitable end: The Angel of Time is passing over us, he thinks midst of his classmates' joy (46). A section that begins propulsively-Let's remember energy-closes with Zuckerman wolfing down rugelach, pastries of his childhood (40). Could these lethal little parcels of saturated fat release him from the apprehensiveness of death, like Proust upon his taste of madeleine?: So, greedily I ate, gluttonously, [. . .] but, end, having nothing like Marcel's luck (47).Over course of fifty years, Roth has evoked subjectivity many modes: shaped by psychoanalysis, circumscribed by history, liberated performance, or transformed by body.2 However, great tableau of reunion distils some remarkably durable patterns: life is defined by aims and ends; energy succumbs to bodily entropy; trajectories are disrupted by unforeseeable events; and all paths converge, six feet under. One key notion-determination-links these teleological concerns.3 word is not exclusive property of any ideology; rather, its ambiguity refracts selfhood many forms, and Roth views male characters, particular, through its prism. Determination may be an imperative, a burden, an asset or a failure, but case of Nathan Zuckerman, it is both vocational necessity and carnal constraint.THE DETERMINED SELFIn early 1970s Roth glossed one of his protagonists, Peter Tarnopol: there is an ironic acceptance of anything at conclusion of My Life as a Man [1974] (or even along way), it is of self. word determined is meant in both senses: driven, resolute and purposive-yet utterly fixed position (Reading 93; italics original). If determination signifies both resolve and constraint, Tarnopol's deeply vexing sense of characterological enslavement seems to be a Freudian bind premised upon an immutable self tied to past (Reading 93). …

High school reunion.

High school reunion.

Vietnam’s Second Revolution

Vietnam’s Second Revolution

Reunion

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ReviewsFull AccessReunionJeffrey L. Geller, M.D., M.P.H., , and Nubia Lluberes, M.D.Jeffrey L. GellerSearch for more papers by this author, M.D., M.P.H., Editor, and Nubia LluberesSearch for more papers by this author, M.D.Published Online:1 Mar 2014https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.650313AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail by James Kennedy George, Jr.; Bloomington, Indiana, AuthorHouse, 2012, 312 pagesThe book Reunion is the first novel of James Kennedy George, Jr., after his retirement from a successful corporate career. The author sets the stage with an initial phone call inviting him to the 45th high school reunion of graduates from Princeton High School in West Virginia, and while delivering stories about those wonderful years, he manages to touch many important aspects of life.The characters are not superheroes, and there are no intricate thoughts delivered in a subliminal way. Instead, the characters come across as real people, similar to those with whom I shared my high school years: the happy types and the risk takers, the more formal and the class clowns, and the “other kids”—those who occasionally would antagonize others. They are characters much like those most readers will remember from their high school experience. Drawing parallels with one’s own school years is easy and irresistible—so easy that it makes the novel feel very real.In the story, Jimmy, the main character, reflects on his experiences: “More vivid memories, etched-in-stone experiences, remain about my classmates than about my own parents.” This is a phrase that many readers can identify with. He describes the struggles to reconcile ambivalent feelings toward parental figures and their flaws. The emotions during those important dialogues are distilled from the book to our psyche.The period of the book is the 1960s, which brings other important themes to the reader’s attention: segregation-desegregation struggles and the contrasting views of parents versus teens. The author conveys a time when young minds were so open to break away from preconceived ideas and yet youths were respectful of their parents’ views.On the down side, I found some chapters to be somewhat slow, but I could not help but think that the information that appears somewhat irrelevant to me may have an important emotional meaning to the author, maybe even for other readers. At times it appeared to me that there was no ultimate goal or end point until I realized, much like life, the book’s teaching points have been given all along.Dr. Lluberes is a general psychiatrist with Fairmont General Hospital, Fairmont, West Virginia, and community psychiatry fellow at the Center for Public Service Psychiatry, Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, Pittsburgh. FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited ByNone Volume 65Issue 3 March 2014Pages e11-e11 Metrics PDF download History Published online 1 March 2014 Published in print 1 March 2014

Impacts of Return Migration on Rural U.S. Communities

AbstractRural population loss is caused as much by low in‐migration as by high out‐migration, and for geographically disadvantaged nonmetropolitan counties in the United States, return migration plays a crucial role. This research captures impacts of return migrants on population, economy, and society in declining rural U.S. communities using a qualitative, multisited approach. Interviews conducted at high school reunions with rural returnees in their late 20s to late 40s show that the vast majority of returnees brought spouses and children back with them, increasing the short‐term and long‐term population. They also brought back much needed human capital, including education, job skills, and life experiences, and filled professional positions that are often hard to fill in rural communities. Entrepreneurial activities and self‐employment of many return migrants favorably affected rural economies by improving the employment base and expanding available services. Interviews show how decisions to move back were grounded in social relations that promoted civic engagement. While they mainly moved back for their children and their families, return migrants valued involvement in familiar social networks and the opportunities to make a difference in their rural hometowns.

Leadership and Self‐Efficacy: Lessons from Harriet Tubman

Leadership and Self‐Efficacy: Lessons from Harriet Tubman

How to Make the Most of Turning 40 and Beyond

How to Make the Most of Turning 40 and Beyond