berkeley high has an open campus, meaning that students can come and go as they please. in theory, outsiders aren't supposed to be able to, but during my tenure there the campus wasn't physically laid out to accommodate access control, so the administration had no real way to keep random people out. the adults, concerned about student safety, experimented with various ways to partially close the campus. none of them worked, because they all required the consent of the governed, and we never gave it.

the year before i entered berkeley high, some students burned down a building. not on purpose or anything - someone just started a trash can fire that got out of control. i guess the building wasn't really needed, so the administration replaced its remains with a grass circle that has some benches and stuff. it was a surprisingly nice space (for berkeley high anyway) and we students collectively decided that it needed a proper name, so we started calling it the Bradley Johnson Memorial Green. our classmate bradley johnson wasn't too happy about that.

on march 23, 2010, barack obama signed the patient protection and affordable care act into law. a lot of people got mad about it, and at barack obama, its champion. in this, they erred. obamacare is my fault.

in my entire berkeley high tenure i only recall one instance of anyone getting bullied for good academic performance. it was by a teacher.

one of the many cultural coronal mass ejections from the internet in the early aughts was the "pirates versus ninjas" "debate". (that wikipedia page is wrong to place it in the "late 2000s" - it was in full swing by 2004 at the latest.) it was an excuse to have goofy, zero-stakes arguments with peers, and therefore catnip for dumb teenagers. you could do more than have mock arguments, though. you could get even stupider with it.