I’m a junior in high school right now, and i hate it when people seem to think that my life is so easy just because I’m not an adult yet. Just because I’m only 16 years old doesn’t mean I don’t put a whole lot of effort into my life. I think I put more in then most adults twice my age. Every morning I wake up at 6:20, get dressed and ready for school. Then I leave for school at 7:15. At school I’m taking all honors and AP courses. Then every season of the year I’m doing a serious sport, and I ever have practices ending before 5:30. 2 or 3 times a week I have to stay after sports for some club or student government meeting or school event. Those days I don’t get home until 7:30. Then I have 1 to 3 hours of homework to do before I can get to bed. So that means every day I have a 10 to 12 hour day, plus I bring a lot of work home.
Next time anyone suggests to me that I have it easy because I’m young I’m just going to go off on them. I’m convinced that 50 years from now I’ll look back on my life and see high school as the busiest four years. I just had to get that off me chest.
Well, not to be a guidance counselor or anything. . .
I found that my high school years were my most productive. I was the ‘geek’ that got picked on, but I worked hard, had 2 part time jobs, and ended up achieving my long-term goal (I’m an officer now…). Stick with what you want, and you’ll do fine. . .
Tripler
The past is just a way of looking at mistakes. Keep in mind your future, now. . .
I probably hear you the loudest cause I’m a sofmore and people tell me the same thing and I have to get up at 5:30 just to get ready for school cause I’m not a morning person and when the bus comes at 6:55 it’s still dark and chilly out like a summer in LA(if you’ve ever been there) then having to wait on set times. Always relying on set times with almost no tolerance for personal independance and the same standards for pretty much everyone an almost everything. All I can tell you is to set the line strait when you can and tuff it out because you’ll get the chance to say the same things to other people(neices, nephiews, teenage friends, ect…) when your an adult so enjoy it while you can.
Stop bitching you little brat. When I was your age I had to walk uphill theough the snow barefoot, both ways to school! We didn’t HAVE remote controls! We had to GET UP OFF OUR ASSES to change the channel! And a bunch of other stuff too!
I know this feels bad to you now. I know this feels really busy, and that your life is really packed and somewhat out of control.
It can be worse, though. That doesn’t mean you don’t have it bad. But it can be worse. Like sleeping in the hall of your apartment building, locked out with your kids because you can’t pay the rent. Like what happened to my Mom when I was 12.
You may think you put in more than adults twice your age. Maybe in terms of apparant busyness and activity you might. But the responsibilities you are subject too canot compare with that of an adult. You are not responsible for your wife/husband, kids, house, car, career. Or yourself.
Total independence is a scary thing. Being the sole person responsible for keeping your family out of a homeless shelter is a scary thing. Knowing that YOU are the captain of your own ship of fate is a scary thing. It may seem fun, but believe me - it makes your stomach churn for the first few years.
Don’t be in a big hurry to grow up. It really sucks ass sometimes.
Una, who is unhappily age 32.
You had FEET! Ee, you were lucky.
Well, let me see. I think we had about the exact same schedule in High School, and since I’m only 24 I think that my perspective is pretty fresh and relavant.
My anal retentive mother always woke me up at about 5:45 AM. The bus picked us up at about 6:25 AM (because a tornado wiped out my HS I had to bus 35-45 minutes away). Had some challenging classes all through school with AP and honors courses (although I’m lucky that it didn’t come too difficult for me) and never had a study hall. I continued to be a 2 sport athlete everyday after school, and with football being a year round sport in my area I never had an evening off including weekends. Honors and AP classes naturally presume that the students have no obligations beyond school so I had a few hours of homework every night. Over the summer and spring months I would work nights, about 25 hrs/week as a stock boy. Eventually I’d get to sleep around 1 AM every night. (My parents wonder why I have always slept til mid afternoon on weekends) Now, I hope you trust that I can relate to you here.
Understand that HS is not easy, and most people won’t tell you it is if they participated in anything at all when they were there.
To carry things a step further, here’s what my typical freshman college schedule looks like. (This is an oxymoron in itself since there is nothing typical about any college student). A few weeks at the start of the semester with very little to do besides party and attend about 15-30 hours of class (mostly optional). All of a sudden a month into the semster all of your exceptionally difficult courses have midterms all falling in the same week. You literally sleep for a grand total of about 10 irregual hours over the 5 day week trying to learn some complex concepts with very very little in the way of guidance and assistance. Once you brave this schedule you get about another month off, where you simply have to maintain a steady schedule of beer drinking, dating, and the occasional class. Of course the nasty cycle of midterms will repeat itself in another month. All culminating in finals week, where you get to not sleep for 2-3 days at a time over the course of 10-12 days, instead of just 5. Happily you get a month of vacation to spend skiing or drinking with friends. Things change once you move ahead each semester, the stressful weeks become longer, and the party breaks in between get shorter. Until eventually you manage to schedule a nice light semster, and relax, but of course you’ll pay for it later.
Now, at first look, alot of people compare the two schedules and think, fuck yeah, college is cake!!! Well, it is alot of fun, and there are times where you’re amazed at how little responsibity you have. Those times are fleeting though, and eventually you begin to see how really important this upcoming hour you will spend in an exam is. You may argue, hey we have exams all the time in HS. But consider that any one of those exams will likely only contribute to a max of 5% of your grade, and you may not realize it but the teachers are there watching and helping to make sure you don’t fail. In College these exams represent 25% of your grade, and also represent several thousands of dollars of yours (or your parents). Once you fail one, you’ll notice that there are no second chances, and that no one really has any interest if you succeed or not. Its your oportunity to grasp, or miss. Its a rare place where they’ll hold your hand if you stumble. I guess in a nutshell you begin to realize that while college day in and day out is easier, you have a hell of alot more to lose. High school is battle of attrition and if you hang in you’ll make it, college is like Navy SeAL SERE training. The likelyhood of you succeeding is slim, and you’re reminded of it frequently.
Its tough to say for sure which is harder, they are very different. It’ll probably depend on your personality, but I don’t think theres any question that college is much more important. That stress offsets a huge volume of tedious hours in class.
Step into the real world, you’ll spend your days waking up at probably 6 AM, getting to the office at 8AM, tapping off an 8-10 hour day and getting home around 6-7 PM. Seems easier than HS or college. When things are going well it is! The trick is when things aren’t going well. Responsibility is a bitch, and very very few HSers understand that. This is a good thing, there are alot of important things a person needs too learn and develop. Too much responsibility at a young age prohibits that. In life there is literally NO ONE watching your back, and this is harder than anything thing else I’ve mentioned. It a different kind of hard than pulling an all nighter, and its a different kind of hard than juggling a dozen activies at once. Its the kind of hard that you can’t explain, can’t really undertstand, can’t share, and can’t really get help with. Its the fact that its so undefinatbale, and therefore evades an easy solution, that makes it such a challenge.
To wrap up a far-to-long post, rest assured that Real Life is easily the hardest thing anyone will ever do. You won;t believe me when I say it, and I can’t really explain why this is. I promise you that in about 10 years you’ll know exactly what I mean.
I think its ignorant for anyone to tell you that your life is easy. Most likely they are venting the trials of the real world on you, or else when they were your age they were lazy bums who spent all day watching after school cartoons. Either way, you don’t need to place any value on their comments. But, words of warning that life ONLY gets harder, and us adults like to take a little morbid joy in your naivety about what awaits ;). You’ll have to forgive us if we chuckle at your complaints, it just means that we would give anything to have them all back ourselves.
I’m 22, so I’m with Omni on this one.
I couldn’t have said it any better.
huh?
Understand - adults who say you have it easy - they are right. And they envy you.
You can choose to quit all your activities. You can choose to take easy classes. You can choose what time you go to bed each night. And you can afford to fail. Miserably. And you can start all over again with hardly any consequence. You can even enjoy a brief life of crime and it won’t count against you as an adult.
Adults rarely have such easy choices.
And the choices you’ve made are comendable and honorable. Most people achieve their largest growth and greatest rewards when they chalenge themselves. You’re off to a good start.
The other end of the spectrum starts out just drifting along with life, all too often spiraling downward into a lifestyle of subsistence, just fighting to survive.
Often, Real Life feels like that. Fighting to survive. A single lawsuit can bankrupt you. Illness or disease can disable your spouse or children, or an elderly parent might need constant care. You can be replaced on the job by a 23 year-old hot-shot who will happily work for half of what they’re paying you. And if you can afford to stay at home and raise your children (like Mrs. Tonk wants me to do), you’ll be 10 years behind in your career when they grow up, competing for entry level jobs. And the bills don’t ever stop.
You have it good right now. And if it doesn’t make sense yet, think about it again 10 years from now.
FTR, I’m 31 years old. I’ve been there.
I know how you felt in high school but it only gets worse in college. I can almost guarentee you that. Here’s typical (if you can call it that) schedule wake up at 2:30 AM to go to work until 7 AM come back get 2 hours sleep go to classes for the day till about 5 at night then do homework and study till about 10 then it’s off to the gym for an hour so I don’t get fat. It’s not easy here in college. Everyone tells you that college is a blast well if I wasn’t so busy with everything maybe it would be a blast I don’t really have that much time for fun. Then after you throw in the fact that my girlfriend likes to take up a good chunk of what little free time I have well then I don’t really have any free time. Hmm sleep I can’t really remember the last time I got more than 4 hours of sleep in one night. Oh well looks as if I’m just going to have to get used to it.
High school was busy and hard and much less rewarding than college or working. In highshcool when the workload was obscene, or the people were nasty to me there was nothing i could do. I worked hard for little gain. I hated it.
Now, if i have a job that is unrewarding or nasty, I updated my resume, send it out and get a new job. I get more pay too when i do that.
I loved being in college. It was tough because we were poor, but i loved choosing my schedule, my classes, my major. I liked taking classes pass/fail if i felt like it. I liked programming 16 hours a day if i felt like it. I liked arguing vehemently with professors and not having them squash me and my opinions but delight in having someone who was thinking in their class.
I love being an adult. I love being able to take a trip to someplace with little warning because i feel like it. I like deciding what kind of clothes i will wear. I like deciding which asshole i will put up with and which asshole i will cut out of my life. I like not haveing to face my abuser daily. I like being able to talk to a friend until 3 am and not have someone freak out. Sure i face the consequencces of those actions, but I don’t mind, as I chose them. I like my job now. For me the hard part is deciding when is the time to move on as i like it but would probably earn more elsewhere. I enjoy marriage and I enjoy my homelife, my love life.
In order to do all these things, I had to get great grades in high school with several activities and then go to college, be very poor and put myself through with the help of scholarships, grants, and loans. If someone had a time machine and looked at the future told me that life always gets harder and I would look back on highschool as the happiest years of my life, and I believed, them the only rational solution would be suicide.
Don’t let all these whiny adults tell you that this is the easiest time of your life. Know that it is damn hard. You need to develop good habits in order to succeed. That alone makes early highshcool more difficult than college. Once I knew how to study and had the discipline to do what I needed to do, high school was easier, not easy, but doable. I needed a lot more sleep as a teen than i do now. I had a lot more I had to get done. I had nosy ppl telling me how to live my life and far too many ppl I had to answer to.
In my opinion, high school is worthwhile because it is on the pathe to college and having degrees made finding good jobs possible.