"Elephant, " which won two awards at the Cannes Film Festival in 2003, dramatized a normal day at a high school that is about to become the scene of a planned mass slaughter by a pair of friends.

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She said she remembered him as a boy in her fifth and sixth grade classes, but said he apparently left the country for a time, and then one day reappeared at her high school.

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Rudy returned to Brooklyn in high school as a scholarship day student at Bishop Loughlin Memorial High, commuting daily on the Long Island Rail Road.

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On marathon day, they joined a group of close friends who had met at Stoneham High School, gathering near the finish line to cheer another friend, a firefighter from Somerville, Mass.

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Still, judging by the bot manning the bar at the APEC forum in Busan, South Korea, we're inching ever closer to the day when ex-jocks don't have a guaranteed post-high school job at that local bar that sells booze to underage football players.

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At any rate, for what it's worth, as both a stay at home mother until my sons were in high school and then a four-day-a week office manager to a plastic surgeon I have experienced both sides of the equation.

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