High School Really Is Life Or Death
You wake up at 6:30 AM or earlier every weekday to get ready to go to high school by either catching the school bus or driving there. You wake up tired with a lack of energy and don’t want to go to school. You arrive at your high school and you already witness bullying, fights, etc which makes the atmosphere of that high school change. You may or may not eat a small breakfast and lunch provided by the school. Then, you go to like 4–6 classes a day, learning, doing work, and trying to maintain good grades. Finally, you leave school drained and tired from being at school for about 8 hours.
Let’s say you are hiking one time and get lost to the point of no return and you are forced to enter survival mode. High school is similar because you go to school Monday-Friday, doing work, maintaining good grades, getting to classes on time, and going home and doing more work. I watched a series called 13 Reasons Why on Netflix, not knowing it was going to cover what goes on in high schools today, from school shootings to bullying, to schools not handling bullying correctly at all, to mental health concerns, to students committing suicide, to a larger police presence in schools due to safety concerns, and even racial prejudice in schools. At the very end of Season 4 in the 13 Reasons Why series, Clay Jensen who is the main character of the series delivers a powerful graduation speech to his fellow classmates and peers. In one part of his speech, he says “This generation, high school actually is life or death. We show up every day not knowing if this is the day we die. If this is the day someone shows up with a gun and tries to kill us all. We practice what we’ll do if that happens.”
Clay is so right in his graduation speech about high school being ‘life or death.’ With the increase in school shootings over the years, we truthfully don’t know if we are gonna be facing that same situation one day at high school, being shot while trying to learn and survive high school. We don’t know if we are just gonna drop and die right there at high school one day hence why he said “We show up everyday not knowing if this is the day we die” because anything can happen. In order to practice for school shootings, many schools do active shooter drills hence what Clay was referencing in his graduation speech. So, in other words, students are practicing what it feels like to be hunted and to feel like they’re gonna die, another statement Clay made when confronting the high school principal after an unannounced active shooter drill was commenced. High school also has mental, emotional, physical, and social effects on us, whether they’re positive or not and we must do everything we can to survive 4 years of high school no matter what. Unfortunately, many high school students fall short of that and either dropout, transition to homeschooling, finish by a GED, or end their lives.
