Webcomic / High School Lessons

"High School Lesson #0001: Murphy's Law. Learn it. Fear it."

"Lesson #0002: See lesson #0001."

High School Lessons is a webcomic by Erin Yvette Haroldsen.

Rowan Wolford has decided to share some stories from her old high school. Which sounds pretty normal, except this school isn't. Being located in a town full of mages and mad scientists, Westpoint High School attracts chaos like a magnet. Dealing with prowling monsters, malevolent technology, and spells gone wrong is the norm. Sometimes the students and teachers are at fault. Sometimes crazy just happens. Fortunately, Rowan picked up a lot of helpful tips in her time there, and is happy to share.

Tropes found in High School Lessons

• Absurdly Powerful Student Council: Subverted. The Student Council is so inconsequential that it took Rowan four months to learn that a flying fox had been elected president.
• The Ace: Fittingly, the person the students call The Ace. She's an inter-dimensional traveler with a résumé covering nearly every job imaginable.
• Acquainted with Emergency Services: Kimberly Bell was hospitalized so many times that it took her an extra three years to graduate.
  Kimberly: Really, I'm fine.
  Paramedic: That's what you said the last 86 times.
• Action Survivor: Pretty much the entire town.
• Anachronic Order: The episodes are not presented chronologically, and sometimes even the chronology within an episode is ambiguous.
• Animate Inanimate Object: Locker #217. He's even dating Kimberly Bell.
• Becoming the Costume: One student enchanted a mask to turn himself into a monster for Halloween. Unfortunately, he got a migraine trying to process all those eyes and tentacles.
• Bottomless Pits: There's one on campus, which a student created for a final project.
• Cassandra Truth: The people of Clark Valley didn't listen to repeated warnings from other towns concerning Eastpoint's nature. They learned the hard way.
• Casual Danger Dialogue: Rowan's job among her group of friends was to lighten the mood in dangerous situations by cracking jokes.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Whenever residents of the nearby towns are shown, they're depicted wearing their respective school colors. Eastpoint is green and copper, Challis is red and white, Salmon is orange and black, Clark Valley is blue and red, and Idaho Falls is black with orange stripes.
• Dance-Off: Pretty common, though most of them are based on endurance, not skill.
• Dodgeball Is Hell: Mostly self-inflicted. Rowan's class started a game that lasted four days.
• Eldritch Location: Westpoint High School. From a floating fifth floor (and no fourth floor) to hallways that sometimes turn into mazes to portals that randomly open inside lockers, it tends to keep students on their toes.
• Extranormal Institute: Unsurprisingly. Besides containing all the supernatural chaos that occurs on a daily basis, the school offers a practical magic class.
• The Faceless: Jayden O'Connor is invisible, and the one time he's depicted as being visible he's shown from the back.
• Food Fight: An ill-advised one encompassed nearly the entire school, though it mercifully didn't extend into the library.
• Gentle Giant: Peony, and by extension the entire cheerleader team. They're built like tanks and are capable of fending off rampaging buffalos, but still enjoy doing cheers and using pom-poms.
• Ghost Town: There's apparently a lot in that part of the state, which hopefully aren't actually the result of wendigo attacks.
• Giant Spider: A couple of students tried to engineer one. Pesky biology kept getting in the way.
• Improvised Weapon: Most students are good at this, though Miss Linton is the reigning champion.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Adam Lennard's overinflated ego led to him attempting a job he wasn't remotely qualified for. He ended up with two broken arms.
• Magic Music: The band has a song called "Battle Mode," which is accepted to warp reality, one way or another.
• Middle School Is Miserable: The normal middle school drama is amplified by the two forces known as The Dread and The Dumb. Also, Nine Rings Middle School was built on the site where crazed mountain men performed blood rituals, which probably doesn't help.
• Non-Indicative Name: Westpoint High School is located in Eastpoint, Idaho. And no one knows what either is east or west of.
• Noodle Incident: The "Newmeyer Incident" is mentioned several times, but never elaborated on, besides the implication that it was pretty traumatic.
• Once per Episode: Nearly every episode contains one of the titular lessons.
• Open Secret: The whole town knows that Mr. Tucker is also the superhero Clash Cymbal. They're just too polite to mention it.
• Orchestral Bombing: The Basketball Chamber Orchestra plays mostly horror music. It works great for psyching out the other team.
• Our Vampires Are Different: Rowan claims there's nearly 500 variations of the vampire curse. None of them are welcomed into Eastpoint.
• Place Worse Than Death: Outsiders consider the town of Eastpoint this. Rowan considers Nevada this.
• Playground Song: Some students trapped on a school bus started singing these to pass the time. The bus driver decided that going out to face a herd of hostile moose was preferable to listening.
• POW Camp: Eastpoint served as one during World War II. Prisoners were allowed to wander freely, since they had nowhere to run.
• Really 700 Years Old: Ms. Jones has been working as the secretary since the school was first built over a hundred years old. No data on how long she lived before then.
• Retconning the Wiki: When one student set up a wiki for the school, only a small portion of editors used it for its intended purpose. The rest just wrote whatever they wanted. Including Rowan.
  Rowan: Not my proudest moment, but it was pretty therapeutic.
• Sanity Slippage: Pretty common. Of note is Mr. Spiel, who snapped just one month after he started teaching and started painting murals in fry sauce.
• Secret Path: The school contains a large number of secret passages, which are sometimes more reliable than the regular hallways.
• Secret Room: A few of these, in addition to the secret passages. These include Kimberly Bell's safety bunker, and a space inside the elevator shaft that someone stuffed with scented candles.
• Selective Obliviousness: Mrs. Wilson is blind to anything remotely supernatural. Not even being mauled by vampires will snap her out of it.
• Show-and-Tell Antics: The high school doesn't do show-and-tell, but some students use props for their presentations like this. It came to a head when one girl brought her pet grizzly bear to school.
• Sir Swearsalot: Old Man Yates was one, at least until he went too far and was saddled with a curse that censored it all.
• Sparse List of Rules: The series is built around this. Given that there are apparently well over 9000 rules Rowan came up with, it's unlikely we'll see them all.
• Stable Time Loop: Time travel exists, but paradoxes are impossible. Unfortunately, you can still bring back a disease from another time.
• Stuffed into a Locker: Played with. One student stuffed Mrs. Wilson into his locker, in retaliation for her not believing there was a portal inside.
• This Is Gonna Suck: Challis High School's (along with several other schools) reaction to playing against Westpoint. Clark Valley students are a little less dignified.
• Weirdness Magnet: The whole town, going back millions of years.