RTM (Week 1): People in High School

It's barely been a week into the school year and already I've seen some ugly and pretty neato stuff. Even though I'm grade eleven I still feel somewhat tiny and insignificant as a member of the school. But this post is not about me. No, the very first Real Talk Monday will be on a kid who came off as obnoxious, and a school (almost) fight.

Let's start off with the ugly thing (by the way, it's not me). Last Tuesday (about a week ago) was the opening day of school. As a member of Students' Council, I was assigned the task of joining a grade eight homeroom and to just float around and help out whenever needed. Pretty simple and solid way of killing about two hours of my day.

So the teacher gets the ball rolling with a little introduction to what the homeroom will be about, and start off with the attendance. Everything's rolling along fine, and I'm sitting in a chair and doing nothing, when all of the sudden there's something different than the usual Here!

It turns out that it's a student who wanted to be called something different. Fair enough. Absolutely nothing wrong with that, in itself. But the way that he went about it, the particular words he chose, and the particular tone made him seem as if he was being picky and trying to get on the teacher's bad side. Dude, it's your first day of high school. Why would you ever try to do anything to get on the bad side of any teacher? Chances are you're going to run into quite a few during your five years here.

Teachers are here to help you, regardless of whatever notion you may have obtained from an older sibling or friend. It's hard to find a teacher with enough malice to actually try to lower your grades. Naturally there are such things as "difficult" teachers, who maybe have a higher standard, or different expectations, but these ones also are the same ones who want to see you thrive and succeed. But it makes it that much harder to be inclined to help you out, if you've already hit it off badly.

Look, I'm saying this all as a spectator. I don't know what the teacher was thinking, or if the teacher even cared. Hell, I don't even know if the student in question was aware of how he sounded, or if he meant to do so. But really, it's a name. People are going to call you lots of different things throughout your life. I'm going to be fair here though, I mean, maybe guy couldn't help it. Maybe he just didn't have the time to go to the office to get his name changed.

Wow that was a mouthful. Now onto the neato thing that I saw.

Nothing big, but the hallways were just crowded, and of course there was shoving. I'm trying to claim a seat by the lockers, and all of the sudden there's some yelling and before you know it, the first fight of the year has nearly started. It's actually the first fight I've seen in my three years of high school, and to be honest, I wasn't sure what to do. But before I could even think about doing anything, one of the grade twelves steps in between them and just kinda stops them from going at it.

I mean, props to you. I'm not sure if I would've been able to do something like that, so really, awesome job there buddy.