High school is often portrayed differently in movies and online than it really is in real life. In fictional stories, high school students have completely different lifestyles, ones that are usually fantastical, adventurous and that aren’t realistic at all. It’s a common misconception that when you get to high school, your life will change in the most dramatic ways. While this is somewhat true, it is very different from how the media likes to portray it.
Junior Kayla Bunch said, “The way high school is portrayed in movies is completely different than how it really is. It’s very ironic if you think about it.”
Homeroom is in almost every movie, book or story about high school. Everyone always has homeroom with their best friends or the person they are interested in, and this is simply not a thing in real life. UC High does have a homeroom, but it isn’t a special separate class. It’s just whatever one’s fourth period is, and half the time, it’s not even a fun class.
Often, high school is described as a place where the popular and unpopular are constantly at odds and battling over control of the school. Sure, there are kids who are outgoing and kids who like to keep to themselves, but in reality, no one is that enwrapped in the social system that many adults seem to think high schools run on. “I always think how interesting it is, how accepting students really are of all kinds of kids and how few negative things that you would see in these movies exist. However, I think bullying is a constant battle. You see that in movies and reality,” said Teacher Leslie Chadwick.
At school, there are no real popular people because no one really cares. There are those people that everyone knows, but they aren’t the stereotypical popular people you see in movies. In movies, there are the girls that run the school and the boys that they date, and those are the popular people. Everyone has their cliques, and cliques aren’t allowed to mix (teenswannaknow.com). However, in the real world, superficial labels rarely cross the minds of students. Everyone has their group of friends or their “squad,” but they have more than just those friends; different types tend to mix more off the pages and screens, especially here at UC High.
It seems as if whenever you switch on the TV or watch a movie that takes place at a high school, that school’s campus looks more like a castle than a public education institution. The lockers are can fit full bodies into them, the cafeteria is designed to accommodate a choreographed dance routine with stunts, the hallways are pristinely clean and there is always a cool, clean place to hang out away from the crowd, like a rooftop garden or a tricked-out club room. When you take a look at these high school depictions and use them to size up public high school in reality, the results are a bit of a… letdown. The lockers at UC High aren’t big enough for anyone to get inside of them, let alone shove someone into. Maybe that’s a good thing, but some rooftop hideouts and secret tunnels would spice up campus.
Lastly, maybe one of the weirdest customs of the cookiecutter high school image is the way that the teachers are portrayed. Teachers are either horribly strict and ridiculous or so chill and laid back that you wonder how any of those kids are going to make it to graduation. In movies, the main character can jet out of class to go save a damsel, and then return the next day and face no consequences, but here, students can’t even go to the bathroom in some classes without making sure they haven’t used up their restroom passes.
As students of real high school in real life, it is always fun to fantasize and wish we attended one of the glamorous schools that the fictitious world likes to create, but at the end of the day, we’ll just have to suck it up and attend real school like everyone else.