Fast Times, Revisited
It had been more than two decades since writer Cameron Crowe spent a year undercover at Clairemont High in San Diego, immortalized in a book and the 1982 movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High. In 2004, writer Jeremy Iversen, a recent Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford University then working at Merrill Lynch, thought the time had come to investigate youth culture again. So, with administrators' permission, Iversen, then 24, bought a new wardrobe and a fake ID and enrolled at Claremont High (in the Los Angeles area) as a transfer student for the spring semester. Known as Mirador High in Iversen's book, the school's real identity was something students learned only after he admitted it on national television. High School Confidential: Secrets of an Undercover Student comes out September 19.
Why did you decide to drop everything and go back to high school?
I had gone to boarding school, and I had grown up in Manhattan-and that's about as far from the normal American growing-up experience as you can possibly get. This was my chance to experience that.
You've said you wanted a Saved by the Bell experience. Did you find it?
I found Saved by the Bell on steroids-literally and figuratively. First of all, lots of people were on steroids. Second of all, you sort of imagine this John Hughes [movie] high school type thing. But then when you get there, and you actually see that's the reality. ... There was such a huge social life component to things.
You raise some pretty frightening alarms.
The first thing is just that so many people were drinking, so many people were having sex, so many people were using drugs. But what seems to me to be the real crisis is the fact that there wasn't a lot of education going on. People were leaving just terribly uninformed about what was going on in the world and lacking lots of skills they would need to survive in the global economy.
One of the teachers appears to spend an entire class period just dissecting cats. Did that really happen?
Yes. People played drinking games in class. I never had to write a paper longer than one page. I never had to find any source beyond the textbook. People thought Spain was in the Middle East, and they thought slavery ended in 1920.
Did you think they were stupid?
No. I've talked to high school teachers who say, "Oh, it's the students' fault. They don't want to learn." My perspective was, the teachers didn't seem to care. A lot of them would chat with five students about their personal life-and that was the class period. Meanwhile, the other 35 students would just stare off into space, talk to each other, text [message] on the cellphones.
Some of the kids you write about seem pretty seriously troubled: depressed, lonely, even alcoholic. You were pretending to be a kid too, but did you ever try to help them?
I tried to in subtle ways. One of my best friends [at Claremont] was 15, and he was thinking about doing steroids ... he was like, "Everyone else is getting so big. Maybe I should try this." And I was like, "No, dude"-I tried to phrase it in 15-year-old language-"your [genitals] will drop off." But when it's one person and there's an entire culture of 2,000 people around you, it's kind of hard to make that change without becoming an outsider.
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