Troy 'High' School

Preparation

    It's Monday morning, already a bad sign. 

    I wake up at 6AM, which despite having just gotten 9 hours of sleep by going to bed at 9PM, still makes me feel tired. Probably because I'm a teenager which means I'm now biologically designed to sleep late and wake up late, but bureaucracy decided otherwise. That same bureaucracy also decided that the elementary kids who have limitless energy and could get 4 hours of sleep and still act like they're on a sugar high should get to start school at 8AM, which is when I should be starting school because my body is designed to wake up later, but I guess I'll start at 6AM instead. 

    I then proceed to get dressed in my outfit, that no matter what I wear, will always look like trash to the hyper-sensitive fashionistas in high school, so I don't even bother to look nice. 

    Normally, if you are in a 2-mile radius of Troy High School, you are eligible for being picked up by a bus to get to school. And since I am miraculously 1.98 miles from Troy High School (I checked), I am not eligible for the bus transport. Of course, the kid who lives five houses down from me and is literally on my street is eligible though, so he gets free transport. As such, I must now walk all the way to Troy High while not only extremely tired, but in a morning so dark it still seems like night. I must then cross several roads to get to the school, all of which are filled with cars dropping off kids at the drop-off stations. So I must now cross busy intersections while barely awake and in pitch black darkness, for five days a week. It is a miracle I have not been hit by a car at this point.

The First Half

    Once I somehow get inside without being run over, I must then go to my first hour that regardless of how easy the class actually is, I am literally always too tired to really grasp the concepts and lessons, making the class a struggle. Of course, if I had this class later in the day, it would be a bigger break from school than lunch. My first hour classes have consisted of Health, Computer Graphics, and Gym for pretty much every semester. The only academic first hour class I've had was World History for one semester in freshman year. Despite how easy these electives are, because it's first hour, I find it a struggle because I am that tired.

    Luckily, all of my complaints about being tired are solved when I have to leave first hour and enter the hallways, which is probably the closest I will ever feel like a Jew in Auschwitz with how suffocating it is. Also, people love to fight in the hallways for some reason, the amount of times I've almost been hit by a stray kick meant for the person ahead of me or have almost been slammed into a locker by someone who decided a good way to prank their friend would be to body tackle them from behind is higher than you would reasonably guess. At the very least, I'm always energized for second hour after my near-death experiences. 

    I then go to my second hour which almost always seems to be my most academic class, Algebra 1 in freshman year, Physics in sophomore year, and now AP English in junior year. Whatever subject it is, I am guaranteed to have a hour of homework of it by the time I get home.

    After another near-death experience in the hallway, I get to my third hour. At this point, it's been a few hours since the day started so I've now gotten used to the torture of being in Troy High so third hour doesn't really bother me. I would almost say the same thing for fourth hour, but fourth hour includes the lovely addition of school lunch.

Lunch

    I don't consider myself an intellectual, but I can say with full confidence that I am smarter than whoever designed the idea of a school lunch. As if the constant threat of suffocation during passing time wasn't enough cramming, someone then decided to stuff around 1000 kids into a room with about 1000 seats, meaning that while there might be enough spots for every kid in the cafeteria, the chances of finding that spot are unlikely. 

    Luckily, the school added additional places for kids to sit during lunch so people wouldn't risk dying by getting trampled as much. For example, the outside portion that exists on the hill, or the portion of tables that exists in the hallway with the doors to the gym and all the trophies. These alone add probably 250 more seats and would actually give students places to sit during lunch. Until it snows and the outside section is uninhabitable to eat in for most of the school year, but at least the portion in the trophy hallway is still ther-they removed that this year? 

    As if adding pointless extensions that don't actually give people more spots to sit wasn't a terrible enough design choice, the school also decides to have the entrance and exit to the most busy and bustling room of the school be a single set of doors that takes literal minutes to pass through. Say what you want about the main stairwell area, but it at least has more than one major entrance/exit.

    And this isn't even mentioning the kind lunch ladies who almost distract you from the radioactively-charged deformed slop that they serve which is so disgusting that it hardly qualifies as food. There is a reason I only ate one school meal during middle school and never again.

Leaving

    After getting through the torturous school lunch, I start fifth hour and proceed to feel a faint glimmer of hope as I near the end of the day that nothing can remove. Not even the fact that my fifth hour seems to always consist of the most improvised and cobbled-together classes of that year deters my hope. Whether it be getting one of the strange first floor science classes in freshman year, or getting a math teacher who was injured which meant I got transferred to a different teacher for most of the first semester in my sophomore year, or getting a math class in the same classroom as my second hour English clas-wait. 

    No matter how rough my fifth hour seems to be, nothing removes my spark of hope of being free from Troy High. Not even another near-death experience during passing time discourages me. By the time that I've gotten to sixth hour, not even a difficult test or challenging academic class is enough to stop my excitement as I count down the minutes to getting out. 

    And by the time that the last bell rings, I'm so happy that I'm almost distracted from the fact that I have homework. Keyword being almost, as any of the joy and accomplishment I would feel by the end of the day is destroyed by the fact that the building designed to prepare me for the real-world gives me additional work once I'm done for the day, which is something not a lot of actual jobs in the real-world do, and if they do, it's never to the extent that school does with hours and hours of additional work to do. As such, I walk home in misery and boredom as I prepare to do hours and hours of homework.

    Ironically enough, students aren't stuck in Troy High, Troy High is stuck within its students. And after doing hours of boring papers and assignments and staying up so late that it's impossible for me to go to sleep at 9PM like I did on Sunday night, I go to sleep and repeat the cycle for 5 more days for 39 more weeks for 2 more years.