When I look back on my high school years, I remember two things: how much I hated them, and the other thing which involved some stuff I’m not so proud to mention… suffice it to say that it involved a calculus teacher, a ruler, and a page of sexual innuendo… besides, the first is more than enough for any person to spend about 8 more paragraphs on.
The first thing you notice when you walk into high school is how unhappy everyone is. They’re all just totally devoid of happiness. Some people learn to ignore the fact they are unhappy, while others, such as cheerleaders, get special surgeries from the same doctors that help Michael Jackson “breathe a little better” so that smiles are permanently glued to their face (glued, that is, until they hit twenty and realize that there’s a life beyond high school and they don’t have any clue how to move around in a world without mini-skirts and pompoms.) Whether they get the special surgeries or not, the whole school is unhappy. You can see it.
The teachers are unhappy because they realize that they’ll have to spend yet another year teaching idiots who can’t spell skate without the 8. The students are unhappy, well, because half of them are girls. Then the administration is unhappy because the government doesn’t give them enough money for how many students they keep unhappy on any given day. High school is just a unhappy, depressing place. This can be shown by a simple look at the statistics:
0 Goth Kids – 1967
Too Many Goth Kids – 2005
(# Goth Kids attending Cyprus – Year)
The startling trend that shows is an alarming increase in Goth kids since the 1960′s. If the world is so black and dark that you have to wear black makeup and clothing to keep in style, what kind of world are you living in? Apparently high school. I mean really, how many Goth kids exist outside of high school? Really? Does anyone ever see them? I’m gonna go with a no, because they’ve probably either A) all committed suicide by the time school is over, B) learned that life isn’t so unhappy it’s okay for a guy to wear makeup, or C) decided that they are going to spend the rest of their life in their room contemplating to themselves the meaning of pain and suffering . Whatever the case, society wins, but again we’re straying from the point – which, being put plainly, is cafeteria food.
Cafeteria food is probably the number one reason students become anorexic or bulimic. For all those stupid videos and assignments we had to do in health regarding these stupid eating disorders, you’d think one of the teachers would catch on to it. The logic behind it is rock solid. If anorexics don’t eat food, and school food is food, then anorexics don’t eat school food. Thus, anorexics are obviously avoiding eating school lunch by not eating food at all. Who’s happy if they’re not eating? Besides Ghandi, nobody of importance.
Of course, the anorexics get the easy way out because the rest of us are choking down the food. And then of course the bulimics choke it back up, but you can’t hold that against them because we’ve all wanted to do that after eating school food. They’re just allowing natural survival instinct to kick in. From there, it’s an obvious extrapolation to determine the core of all the unhappiness in the school – the five paragraph essay, something that creates a gag reflex from just hearing it.
You remember those horrid five paragraph essays you always had to write, I’m sure. The ones that start with a beginning and end with a conclusion and somewhere in the middle have 3 provable parts. The whole formula creates a complete and total gag reflex of the mind, which students are quick to mop up into a semi-cohesive mass known as an essay. Rarely, if ever, do the students get a chance to take the assignment and do something useful with it, it’s just, “*gag* blehhh! Here’s your essay Mister So and So.”
The five paragraph essay is the epitome of unhappiness. You may think I exaggerate, but how many kids groan when they hear the teacher saying it? How many teachers groan at home while they’re reading them? How many goth kids groan just because the other kids are unhappy and they need to show them how it’s done? Essays are the bane of high school existence. Or are they?
Perhaps the real bane of high school existence is that nobody wants the essay to be more than it is: sad, pathetic, useless. Essays aren’t the bane of high school existence because writing is hard to do, they’re the bane because they typically represent the stifling environment high school is, a place totally devoid of creativity and, even worse, a place where everything is simply an exercise in futility.
Which, cleverly enough, brings us back to the Calc teacher and sexual innuendo. The real problem I have with high school is that in a calculus class we were told to waste our time writing an essay. Essays aren’t a part of calculus, nor will they ever be, but we were asked to write one nonetheless. Yet when a student – me – challenged that futile assignment and tried to change it into an opportunity for creativity, he was attacked for having thought to break the mold and try something new.
I was shot down for creative writing in a calculus writing assignment that was simply included in the curriculum to earn money for encouraging creative writing skills, imagine that! If it’s not reason enough to hate school because they waste your time with essays that don’t mean anything, it’s got to be enough when they mark you down making those essays mean something.