With the stress of finals and the end of the semester, you probably found yourself getting so overwhelmed that you started missing “the easy days” a.k.a. high school. While the workload may have been simpler and there were definitely some things worth being nostalgic for, there is so much more that we don’t miss about those four years. Read on to be reminded of why you are happy to be done with high school and have made it to college.
1. Gym class.
Mentions of fitness testing and the mile still give us anxiety.
2. Life being controlled by bells.
3. Classes with assigned seats.
4. The SATs/ACTs/AP tests.
5. Riding the school bus.
6. Needing a pass to go literally anywhere.
7. All of the drama.
Keeping track of who wasn’t talking to who and for what reasons got exhausting.
8. Not having more than a week off at a time during the year.
9. Summer vacation starting at the end of June.
10. Waking up so early every day.
It remains a mystery to all of us how we managed to get up at 5:30 and be in school before 7:00 every day when 8:00 a.m. classes in college are impossible.
11. There being no boys (if you went to an all-girls school).
12. How immature most of the boys were (if you didn’t go to an all-girls school).
13. The college application process.
If we were given the choice between finals and college applications…we’d choose finals.
14. Not being allowed leave the school to get lunch (or even leave the cafeteria with your lunch).
15. Health class.
16. Homework over the summer.
Thank goodness summer reading lists, math packets and AP work are things of the past.
17. Freshman year.
18. Still needing to show up for class if your teacher was out for the day.
19. Cafeteria food.
Dining hall food may not be anything to get excited over but at least it is significantly better than the questionable looking things we called lunch in high school.
20. The cafeteria itself.
21. Foreign language oral reports.
22. The crowded hallways.
You had no choice but to just stop caring about personal space.
23. Memorizing a locker combination just to have it still not work half the time.
24. Having so many classes in a day and so little time to do the homework.
25. Needing to get permission from teachers to go to the bathroom.
And then inevitably having this exchange at least three times per week:
26. Silent study halls.
27. Needing to hide out in the bathroom in order to use your phone.
28. The dress code.
Being told to change because your shorts didn’t pass the fingertip rule.
29. Parent-teacher conferences.
30. Having three minutes to get from class to class.
31. School picture day.
Or worse…”getting school pictures back” day.
32. Not being able to just skip class if you were having a rough day.
33. Being in school for six hours every day.
34. Being stuck with bad teachers for an entire year.
35. Having very little choice as to what classes you took.
36. Gossip.
37. The nurse’s office.
And how the nurse thought cough drops solved everything.
38. Having homework due every day in all of your classes.
39. The amount of textbooks, binders and notebooks you needed to carry around and keep track of (no laptops allowed).
40. Everyone knowing everyone else.
This definitely wasn’t all bad but by the time you got to high school, you were ready to meet some new faces.
41. Needing a note from home to leave school early (and the crisis of losing that note).
42. Not having the same lunch wave as your friends.
43. Having so little freedom.
The overarching theme of high school: Not enough freedom.
We made it through four years of drama, unreasonable dress codes, and suspicious looking cafeteria food… no matter what college throws your way, you’ve got this!