High School Sucks

Yes, you heard me right. I said high school sucks, that’s my speech title. Sit back, breathe it in, because we all know it’s true. High school is a mix of stereotyping, judgement, unruly expectations, and failures. Yeah, of course you can state your claim and say “Well not everything about high school is bad Tabitha, don’t be so negative.” I’m not being negative. High school really truly absolutely 100% sucks, and here’s why.

Let me start at square one, freshman year. Yes, we all remember that year, though we prefer to forget it. Freshman year was full of intimidation, judgemental stares, and those weird upperclassmen that laughed at everything we did because we were “children”. Freshman year is full of not being taken seriously at the wrong moments, for example the upperclassmen. To anybody above our grade, we were branded with the names “Kid” and “Freshy” and the oh-so popular and my personal favorite “Fresh Meat”. We could do anything, read a book, sit at a table, eat an apple, literally anything and still get branded with these names. We couldn’t do anything without being taken as a joke to anybody in the room considered an “upperclassmen”. As well as not being taken seriously, there were moments where we were taken seriously but, as usual, at the wrong moments, for example, teachers. The moment we come to high school every single teacher says the same thing, “You’re high schoolers now, act like it.” Freshman year is mind boggling, I mean somehow everyone expects for us to be mature and immature at the same time, how funny. Freshman year sucks.

I like to think of sophomores as the invisible class. It doesn’t matter which class it is, every single year it’s like the sophomore class isn’t even there. Possibly it’s because everyone is sick of all the crap they got as freshman that they decided to lay low for a year, or maybe it’s because they are plotting their revenge, who knows? Sophomores are like the stoners of high school, and no I don’t mean literally, because we have a lot of those already, I mean they are always calm and collected because the truth of it is, sophomore year is the easiest one out of them all. Nobody has any expectations for sophomores. They are no longer freshmen, so they are no longer children. But, they are also not considered mature because they just haven’t made it there quite yet. Freshmen get told “Hey you’re a highschooler now, we expect you to be one”, Juniors get told “Hey you’re about to be seniors, act like adults”. Sophomore year is just a happy medium between the two. And even though it doesn’t sound that bad, yes, sophomore year sucks too.

Junior year is the worst year ever. It is the year when college gets brought up the most, it’s the year where nobody can decide if they should treat you like an adult or not, it is the year where everyone expects everything from you. Somehow everyone expects that all the juniors suddenly know where they want to go to college, suddenly expected have a job, suddenly expected to have their permit and their own car, and with all this mixed in, they also have the worst homework out of all of the classes. Maybe it’s not planned out that way but I swear junior year was the hardest. Junior year really sucked.

Finally, the end of it all, senior year. Senior year is full of unbelief. I don’t think any one of us felt like a senior when we finally became one. I personally was still stuck in my freshman year mentally. Senior year is the time where you are allowed to make fun of the underclassmen, where you’re allowed to leave school to get a pizza, and where you’re miraculously allowed to interrupt other classes just to say hello to the teacher all while not getting in trouble at all. Senior year sucks.

If you don’t get my point yet, I’ll say it again. High school sucks. But I didn’t say that was a bad thing. All my life I had adults tell me that nothing in highschool matters, I won’t have any friends from highschool after it’s over and I probably won’t use half of the information I learned and they were right. All my life I have thought “Man school sucks, I can’t wait to be an adult so life doesn’t suck anymore!” Well news flash, nothing changes when you leave school. It still sucks. Life outside of school is also full of stereotyping, judgement, unruly expectations, and failures. But the one thing we learn from high school is that it doesn’t have to suck if we don’t let it. Yes, high school was and is terrible, and yes life isn’t very great, but I regret nothing. I enjoyed highschool, I made the most of my time there. I have good memories and fun times that I would never take back. Highschool may have sucked but it sucked in the best way it possibly could and that’s all we can ask for. My message to anybody reading or listening to this speech is, no matter where you’re going next, highschool, college, work force, etc. it will suck, but that doesn’t need to be a bad thing because even when things are horrible, there is always something that isn’t horrible. For everything that is bad, there’s something that isn’t bad, and that makes life worth living. So go, live your future knowing that, oh man, it is going to suck, but that’s okay. 

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