text: I graduated from PVHS in 1976, the Bicentennial year! Moved to Phoenix (and into PVHS) near the end of my sophomore year, 1974. By comparison, the high school I left (in Wisconsin) and the school I came to (PV) were opposite ends of a coin.\n\n1. There aren't any cowboys in Wisconsin. In contrast, I got to describing PV as \"6,000 cowboys and the Drama Club.\" And I wasn't far off. \n2. None of the required reading in my high school in Wisconsin (Slaughterhouse 5 by Vonnegut and Siddhartha by Hesse, for example) we even AVAILABLE in the PV library. I remember asking about those titles and the librarian called them \"smut\" and seemed offended that I would ask. (If found out that if you wanted to read those books you had to take classes from Mrs. Alderman, who was the best English teacher EVER. She just passed in 2011 at age 97. )\n3. The quality of education in Wisconsin, on a scale of 1-10, was 12. Here, they were happy to teach at a level of about 6. \n4. Smoking at both high schools was not allowed but people did it anyway. Smokeless tobacco though? In Wisconsin nobody'd even HEARD of it. Out here, it was Cowboy Candy! Guys were spittin' that shit all over campus.\n5. You could bring a knife to school and wear it on your belt and nobody cared. In Wisconsin, nobody even thought about doing that.\n6. By coming to PV I managed to get through high school without ever writing a \"term paper,\" because none of my teachers ever asked for them. In Wisconsin I couldn't have avoided it.\n7. The study hall was a great advancement out here, compared to the cafeteria used in Wisconsin. PV's study hall was a separate building with a very small room you could actually study in. The rest of the building was filled with air hockey machines, pool tables, a snack bar and a stereo playing whatever albums kids brought in to play. \n8. I will say that the English department down here had it all over my Wisconsin HS, because you could take classes based on types of literature. I took Science Fiction, Humor in Literature and other interesting classes.\n9. In Wisconsin,the drinking age was 18, which means seniors and teachers frequently socialized at the same bars. This led to odd situations, to be sure, but nobody went to jail for it. In AZ at that time drinking age was 19. That didn't keep the occasional teacher and student from commingling, but nobody cared. It was a different time.