High school is something that all people experience. However, I think that adults forget how high school feels at the moment. We learn all we can at the high school level, but sometimes it feels like we do not get credit for how hard we work. Adults get a lot of credit for their work and are seen as superior to every single student.
With all the pressure we have on us, we would expect to have more freedom for wiggle room from our administrators and some sort of respect for our wishes from teachers and school board members.
High school students and adults are not that different. However, adults get a little bit of superiority just because they are over the age of 18. There are 35 hours of school plus more for work or extracurriculars a week. A fourth of us are, or about to be adults and are expected to make big decisions, stay on top of grades, show up to work and go to sports practices. However, many of the adults around, treat students like children who cannot think for themselves.
In college, I won’t have to put my phone in a pocket on the wall or ask to use the bathroom. We should be given more freedom as high school goes on, but rules have only gotten stricter in the past two years. We can’t be expected to transition smoothly from the strict guidelines of high school to no guidelines in college without a middle point.
Experience in making mistakes is how we learn, but we aren’t being given the space to make those mistakes. We are forcefully being molded into a desired shape by our education system. Organized, tight-knit, on time, respectful and ready to be in a nine-to-five job, but what if I want to be different? For how many hours we spend in school, it should be expected that we will be comfortable, but we are not.
On top of the uncomfortable position we are put in, we are overloaded with work. After seven hours of working straight, we have homework at the end of the day. There are many students who have extracurriculars or jobs to go to after school and can really feel pressure to keep up. There have been multiple occasions where I have to do homework after closing at my job at 10:30 p.m. Despite all this work, we are barely credited. We are told to be quiet when we talk, asked why we stand up for a moment in class or told we can not use the restroom.
To make matters worse some teachers love to give out busy work. Also to take it a step further in frustrations it takes a while for them to grade it, if they ever decide to. But it will surely go into Infinite Campus missing the day after. The next consequence in this sequence is the text from my mother asking why I am failing, and so on. It seems as though some teachers like to see students dig a hole for themselves and be buried in it.
What most do not understand is we are the ones keeping this school open. We have power over every teacher, principal and the school board members. We are not here to be subjected by faculty and talked about publicly in school board meetings. Why can we not have a say in what happens at our school? Adults don’t deserve to curb our high school experience because of their opinions.
At this point in my high school career, the most important thing to me is experiencing everything I can regardless of what my grades look like. I absolutely try my best in school, I make passing grades and I do my homework like a good student. However, at the end of the day, I speak up for myself to authority, question traditional beliefs and am open to any new thing thrown my way. School is not my life, and failing is not my downfall. Pressure used to consume me, but now I have found my sight.
