In September 1983 I entered Grade 9 at Grand River Collegiate in Kitchener. I would spend the next five years attending that school – Grade 13 was still a thing in Ontario in those days. It would be the longest amount of time I would ever spend at one school.

Starting high school was a simultaneously terrifying and exciting adventure. First of all, the school was so much bigger than any other I’d experienced – there were about 1300 kids there when I attended. Second, I went from spending all day with the same classmates to having new people in each class, as we moved to the concept of choosing options.

Grand River Collegiate Institute in Kitchener, Ontario. From the outside, at least, it looks much the way it did when I attended.

Options meant that I could carry on with classes I quite enjoyed – French and music, for instance – and I could drop the ones I wasn’t very interested in. Physical Education was no longer compulsory when I entered high school, and I dropped it. Like a stone (see link to an earlier post about my aversion to sports). Mathematics, which I always struggled with, sadly I wasn’t able to drop as that was a compulsory subject.

But there were also other new options that attracted me. There was a drama class, which I was looking forward to taking. A keyboarding class gave me the chance to learn how to touch type – I initially I picked it up because I thought it would help my writing, but it turned out to be the most useful skill I ever learned in school.

My homeroom in Grade 9 was the music room. The school was in the shape of a wide V, with two corridors merging into a ‘hub’ in the centre where the ‘Cafetorium’ (ie the room that served as both cafeteria and auditorium) was located. If you had a locker around the central hub, you had time to visit it between classes. The locker you were allocated was generally near your homeroom classroom. The music room was at the very end of a corridor that had very little else in it, and my locker was so out of the way that first year of high school I ended up carrying most of the books I would need for my school day around with me from class to class.

The first week at high school was overwhelming. I remember arriving late for my first science class because I got lost trying to find the classroom. But it was also quite exciting. There was just so much more going on. There were so many clubs to join, and I enthusiastically threw myself into so many of them. Choir and concert band. The school newspaper. The yearbook staff. Drama club.

Grade 9 school picture – taken about six weeks before my 14th birthday.

Although I stayed as far away from sports as I could – I think the only time I ever set foot in the gymnasium was for the Freshers Dance that was held there – the team name for the school, the Renegades, applied to all who attended the school. I embraced it in the search for identity that we all struggle with during adolescence. I was proud to call myself a Grand River Renegade.

The song for this year was actually released in 1979, but it became such an integral part of my high school experience, I still think about my high school days whenever I hear it. Styx were a huge band in Canada in the 1980s, but they were virtually unheard of in the UK. I believe they had one hit here, with ‘Babe’.

But here is their song ‘Renegade’, which will always be, for me, the theme song for my high school. This one is just audio, sadly – couldn’t find a version on Youtube with a video. Fellow Renegades, maybe it will be bring back memories for you, too.