The Things We're Glad to Leave Behind
When you think back to your time as a student, you might remember the good parts, like swinging around on the playground or hanging out with your friends. But what probably springs to mind most are the bad parts: waking up early, being swamped with homework, and cramming for exams. Sure, education is rewarding, but you're likely more glad that it's over. Here are 20 things you definitely don't miss about school.
1. Waking Up Early
One thing we all definitely don't miss about school is waking up early. Remember 8AM lectures and needing to set our alarms to ring an hour (or two) early? Walking to class bleary and still half-asleep? Yup, those are days we're happy with leaving in the past.
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2. Sitting for Hours in Class
Waking up early isn't even where the horrors end—it's having to sit in class for seven to eight hours straight. Not only are you still blurry-eyed and your brain is barely functioning, but you're also expected to be alert and ready to absorb the seemingly endless stream of new information being thrown at you.
3. Needing Permission to Go to the Bathroom
When you get to college and realize that you no longer need permission to head to the bathroom, it's like a whole new world opens up to you. But when you're still stuck in high school and earlier grades, you're being scrutinized every time you get out of your seat. Upset stomach? Tough luck dealing with that.
4. Worrying About Grades
Your grades and GPA are the most important aspects of school; after all, you need to maintain a good report to further your education and build on your knowledge. But the stress of keeping your grades up can take a huge toll on your mental health, and for that, we're glad we no longer need to worry about it once we're out of school.
5. Pop Quizzes
If having to wake up early every day wasn't draining enough, our teachers also often hit us with pop quizzes. And if you hadn't been paying attention in class or keeping up with your assignments? You were lucky if you even passed those quizzes.
6. Midterms & Exams
Midterms and final exams aren't the type of assessments that are randomly sprung on you, but they're stressful nonetheless. They often count for a huge chunk of your final mark, too, meaning that if you don't do so hot, you'll probably need to retake the class.
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7. Weekends Piled with Homework
There's no rest when you're in school, and that's true even on the weekends. Unless you're a star student who gets all their homework done as soon as it's assigned, you're spending your off days studying and catching up on all the things you procrastinated on.
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8. Carrying Heavy Textbooks
Phew, remember those heavy textbooks you had to lug around all the time? Sure, you had the choice to shove them in your lockers, but if you brought them home to do your assignments, you had to heft them back—which meant bad news for your shoulders.
9. Getting Called on Unprepared
Another thing we all definitely don't miss about school is having to sit in class, sweating and squirming, while avoiding eye contact every time the teacher posed a question. Even if someone else raised their hand, your name was still sometimes called on instead, and most of the time you were left drawing a blank.
10. Long Commutes
Whether you drove or took public transit to school, it still took a huge chunk of time out of your day—time you could've better spent sleeping. Plus, if your school didn't have a big parking lot, it was like the Hunger Games trying to find the last slot. Talk about stressful.
11. Expensive Food Choices
If you didn't bring your own lunch with you and had to buy food on school grounds, it was definitely leaving a hole in your wallet. The worst part was that these choices were usually pretty mediocre in taste, too, which made their ridiculous pricing all the more atrocious.
12. Detention
Troublemakers probably only got relief when they moved on to college, but in high school, having to stay overtime after class was likely a common occurrence for them—and the worst punishment they could've imagined. After you're fully graduated? Goodbye to sitting for an hour after school just because you were late by one minute.
13. Boring Assemblies
Technically, assemblies were both a blessing and a curse in disguise, because on one hand they meant you didn't have class, but on the other hand they were so boring to sit through that it was impossible to stay awake. Plus, unless you were given proper chairs, you could only sit criss-crossed applesauce for so long until your legs went numb.
14. Limited Time to Rush to Your Next Class
If your school spanned several buildings, floors, and hallways, getting to your classes was like running a marathon or solving a maze. You were lucky if you managed to make it on time (your poor, sore calves), but if you didn't, you were bursting in through the door like a crazed maniac.
15. Bad Dorm Roommates
If you lived in a dorm, it was a gamble to get good roommates. Unless you had a choice to choose your own friends, you were often stuck with people you might tolerate on a good day—but wouldn't want to stand within 10 feet of on a bad day.
16. Gym Class
Unsurprisingly, no one misses gym class... unless you were a school athlete and loved running. Otherwise, gym class was a chore to go to no matter what unit you were doing, even though it did help you stay active during your years as a student.
17. Stress About Choosing a Career Path
Stressful as it sounds, especially when you're a teenager and barely a fully grown adult yet, your time in school is meant to prepare you for your future career. That meant whatever you decided as your major in college was the path you were committing to, and that can be a lot to shoulder when you're still young.
18. College Applications
You only had little time for relief after graduating from high school—college was next. And even before you threw your hat into the air you had to pick your next school and fill out applications, making sure your next few years were thoroughly planned out. It's only when you walk down the stage in college that the whole ordeal is finally over.
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19. Group Projects with Slackers
Group projects weren't all that bad to tackle—that is, if you were paired with the right people. If you ended up with the slackers? That meant only half of you were putting in the elbow grease while the other half were skipping school altogether.
20. Cliques
Another thing we definitely don't miss about school? The cliquey crowds. It was often the popular group that got all the attention, while everyone else was labeled as nerds, geeks, or outcasts. Sure, these kinds of groups still sometimes happen in the workplace as an adult, but at least you have a better sense to steer clear once you're older.
