Now playing: True Colors by Cyndi Lauper. (Until I find a good copy of Girls Just Wanna Have Fun...not just pathetic little drummings!) Sometimes, things just sort of suck. It's the way life goes. Can't do a whole lot about it (at least, you can't stop what's going to happen from happening most of the time. However, if you get involved or something drastic like that, sometimes you can actually make a difference. Or you get laughed out of the school. Either way, right?) This page isn't necessarily about making the world a better place, it's just a page for me to talk about what bugs me. I am particularly irate today... The Senior Privilege Thing When you're a lowly underclassman (underclassperson?), you hear about it all the time. (Mostly you hear about you're infringing on it.) You see the articles in the school paper, the freshmen flying through the air, and you realize something. This is the nature of senior privileges. Every school must have them in some way, shape or form. At U-E (Union-Emptycott), it goes like this: A locker of your choice in the Senior Locker Area.Senior Study Hall, where you can eat, hang out, etc.the right to torment any and all underclassmen That's about it. If there's any others, they're long forgotten. But here's my rundown of the three privileges: 1. Senior Locker Area. That would designate it being for seniors, right? But all too often, uninvited underclassmen show up. Nothing against underclassmen. I was once an underclassman in the Senior Locker Area, too. But please manage to get yourselves invited! All my friends were seniors, so I could get away with it. (And when your significant other's a senior, people shut up about your presence in the Senior Locker Area.) However, all too often, stray sophomores and juniors can be found, strutting their stuff on the catwalk between the senior cafeteria and the foreign language hall. (I won't even bother listing the "senior" cafeteria as a privilege, because the only people who use it are underclassmen. Seniors go out for lunch.) You won't actually find too many freshmen, because they're all scared as hell of dwarf-tossing. (See privilege #3.) So, you'll find lots of sophomores and juniors hanging around down there, blocking the narrow passageways between lockers and generally making a mess of things. But then, of course, there's the people who lump all underclassmen together, and that's just not right, either. Practically all my friends are either older or younger than me. I'll be damned if I'm going to exclude my underclassmen friends simply because some senior's feeling threatened by a fifteen-year-old. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, right? Not if there's a particular locker you want. It's outlined in the newsletter that all seniors get to choose their own lockers. Guess this doesn't include the five rows of lockers "reserved for new students". How many new students are going to show up in their senior year? Due to this ridiculous ruling, I got stuck with a locker I didn't want. I had already chosen my ideal location (and found a couple of backups), only to find that all of them were "reserved." We've been in school for thirteen years now--I think we deserve a little more respect than that. How can we choose our lockers when half of them aren't able to be chosen? It's not as if a new student couldn't find a locker. When I moved here in ninth grade, they gave me the first empty locker they found. They didn't have one set aside just in case I decided to go to school there. Besides, new students should be encouraged to have lockers among the other students, as opposed to being at the only unreserved locker in three rows. Why sequester someone in their last year of high school. This new ruling of theirs is not only unfair to current students, but also anyone new who comes along. And what is the privilege of having a locker in the basement, exactly? It's times like this I wish I was president... 2. Senior Study Hall. If your grades are high enough, you can chat with a bunch of people you're not really friends with and eat cafeteria food. How is this a privilege? People set up their schedules for the sole purpose of having study halls in their senior year (which I don't advocate anyway), only to be told that they can't go anywhere, and their friends are all in other study halls. Great. A plan was devised to give seniors an open study hall, where they could leave campus during study hall. The open campus policy works fine at lunch, why not study hall? Wrong. So...you can't get any work done because everyone's goofing off, but none of your friends are there, and you can't go anywhere else...so what's the point of this one? I have a study hall during a lunch period. Damned if they'll give me Senior Study Hall then. I'd be visiting underclassmen and going outside, after all, and that's strictly taboo at U-E. 3. Beating up underclassmen. It's classic, right? Dwarf-tossing (verb: definition--throwing freshmen over lockers, into lockers, etc.) is practically an Olympic sport. Even if you don't beat them to a bloody pulp, they'll still believe you when you tell them that gym class is held in the 5th floor shooting range. Right? Wrong. Teachers just don't advocate the healthy bullying of younger, obnoxious students. It's only the nice ones who get it, and they're probably not going into the senior lockers to begin with. Senior year just isn't what it's cracked up to be. My advice: have a great senior year, but don't expect a whole lot of great stuff from the administration. You're lucky the prom isn't in the gym.
Sometimes, things just sort of suck. It's the way life goes. Can't do a whole lot about it (at least, you can't stop what's going to happen from happening most of the time. However, if you get involved or something drastic like that, sometimes you can actually make a difference. Or you get laughed out of the school. Either way, right?) This page isn't necessarily about making the world a better place, it's just a page for me to talk about what bugs me. I am particularly irate today...
The Senior Privilege Thing
When you're a lowly underclassman (underclassperson?), you hear about it all the time. (Mostly you hear about you're infringing on it.) You see the articles in the school paper, the freshmen flying through the air, and you realize something. This is the nature of senior privileges. Every school must have them in some way, shape or form. At U-E (Union-Emptycott), it goes like this:
That's about it. If there's any others, they're long forgotten. But here's my rundown of the three privileges:
1. Senior Locker Area. That would designate it being for seniors, right? But all too often, uninvited underclassmen show up. Nothing against underclassmen. I was once an underclassman in the Senior Locker Area, too. But please manage to get yourselves invited! All my friends were seniors, so I could get away with it. (And when your significant other's a senior, people shut up about your presence in the Senior Locker Area.) However, all too often, stray sophomores and juniors can be found, strutting their stuff on the catwalk between the senior cafeteria and the foreign language hall. (I won't even bother listing the "senior" cafeteria as a privilege, because the only people who use it are underclassmen. Seniors go out for lunch.) You won't actually find too many freshmen, because they're all scared as hell of dwarf-tossing. (See privilege #3.) So, you'll find lots of sophomores and juniors hanging around down there, blocking the narrow passageways between lockers and generally making a mess of things. But then, of course, there's the people who lump all underclassmen together, and that's just not right, either. Practically all my friends are either older or younger than me. I'll be damned if I'm going to exclude my underclassmen friends simply because some senior's feeling threatened by a fifteen-year-old. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, right? Not if there's a particular locker you want. It's outlined in the newsletter that all seniors get to choose their own lockers. Guess this doesn't include the five rows of lockers "reserved for new students". How many new students are going to show up in their senior year? Due to this ridiculous ruling, I got stuck with a locker I didn't want. I had already chosen my ideal location (and found a couple of backups), only to find that all of them were "reserved." We've been in school for thirteen years now--I think we deserve a little more respect than that. How can we choose our lockers when half of them aren't able to be chosen? It's not as if a new student couldn't find a locker. When I moved here in ninth grade, they gave me the first empty locker they found. They didn't have one set aside just in case I decided to go to school there. Besides, new students should be encouraged to have lockers among the other students, as opposed to being at the only unreserved locker in three rows. Why sequester someone in their last year of high school. This new ruling of theirs is not only unfair to current students, but also anyone new who comes along. And what is the privilege of having a locker in the basement, exactly? It's times like this I wish I was president...
2. Senior Study Hall. If your grades are high enough, you can chat with a bunch of people you're not really friends with and eat cafeteria food. How is this a privilege? People set up their schedules for the sole purpose of having study halls in their senior year (which I don't advocate anyway), only to be told that they can't go anywhere, and their friends are all in other study halls. Great. A plan was devised to give seniors an open study hall, where they could leave campus during study hall. The open campus policy works fine at lunch, why not study hall? Wrong. So...you can't get any work done because everyone's goofing off, but none of your friends are there, and you can't go anywhere else...so what's the point of this one? I have a study hall during a lunch period. Damned if they'll give me Senior Study Hall then. I'd be visiting underclassmen and going outside, after all, and that's strictly taboo at U-E.
3. Beating up underclassmen. It's classic, right? Dwarf-tossing (verb: definition--throwing freshmen over lockers, into lockers, etc.) is practically an Olympic sport. Even if you don't beat them to a bloody pulp, they'll still believe you when you tell them that gym class is held in the 5th floor shooting range. Right? Wrong. Teachers just don't advocate the healthy bullying of younger, obnoxious students. It's only the nice ones who get it, and they're probably not going into the senior lockers to begin with. Senior year just isn't what it's cracked up to be.
My advice: have a great senior year, but don't expect a whole lot of great stuff from the administration. You're lucky the prom isn't in the gym.