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| Scene from HBO's Euphoria (2019) |
Does this sound like the kind of high school you attended? Road parties? Puking friends? One hundred stumbling teenagers in a senior's house when parents are out of town?
Was your high school wilder than that or tamer?
Do you think bigger schools are wilder than smaller schools? And urban schools are wilder than rural schools?
Do you think adults in your community were too much about the behavior of students in your school? Or did they not fully realize how reckless student behavior actually was?
To people looking in on my microscopic school in rural Oklahoma, they would see a wholesome, all-American high school. Complete with a rich athletic history in baseball and a Future Farmers of America chapter, Asher seems like an ideal place to raise your kids. We had good academics and great teachers, but when kids can’t complete the work, what good does it do? In the three years I attended, I witnessed my seemingly angelic classmates that I had met the year before I moved at basketball games, turn into manipulating, sneaky, and jealous party goers. They would spend the weekends getting drunk, having sex with boys who had girlfriends and pretending to be girls’ friends to their face. Adults (teachers, staff, usually even parents) would know about these extracurricular activities and do nothing. But I also attended a 6A school my freshman year, and it was just as wild. It was the same stuff, just happening more out in the open. Party buses after dances with 20 fourteen-year-old girls getting drunk off alcohol their parents bought for them. I think parents and teachers write this behavior off as “just teenagers!” and “kids being kids”. I believe that this is one of the cycles that Smarsh mentions in the book. Parents partied, and they survived, so surely their children will survive.
ReplyDeleteJessica King
I grew up in a small town and attended a smaller high school. I agree, smaller schools are just as wild and possibly even wilder than larger schools/towns. My reasoning is, news spreads so fast in a smaller school, and if there was a party going on EVERYONE would be there. I also agree on the fact that parents often influence their teens to party because they did the same thing in high school.
DeleteMy graduating class had 84 students, of those 84 students 42 drank on a regular basis, and 63 juuled or dipped. They might not be sex crazed and throwing up at parties, but you could be sure no matter what day of the week there was a party of some sort going on. The junior class has 92 students and 83 of them drink and juul right along with the senior class. Our school had to implement a rule about bullying and nudes that if it happened outside of school and was brought up during school hours both parties involved could face suspension regardless if they were the ones talking about it. Just because you come from a small town or big town doesn’t matter. High schoolers will party just because they feel like it.
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DeleteI agree that regardless of the size of one’s town or school, if a teenager wants to party, he or she will. Considering that we both graduated from the same high school, I agree with the fact that people threw a party for every reason they could find. However, when these parties occurred, not only did peers from our school show up, but also peers from surrounding schools, despite how well they knew or did not know the host. I do not know much about your graduating class, but as I recall, most of my female peers started engaging in sexual activities during our freshman year. In addition, people in my class sent around inappropriate pictures and bullied others through social media as well. During my freshman year, the principal and other teachers were not super involved in these situations unless they occurred on campus. For instance, if they heard about some wild party, they would not say anything; when we had a winter formal and people were dancing inappropriately on one another, no student ever heard the end of it.
Delete-Payton Hodges
I believe that high school "wildness" depends on what group you hung out with. For me, I heard about late night parties and was invited to go off roading every weekend, but I rarely went. I believe that all high schools have both wild and tame parties no matter their class size. It isn't about where the school is or how big it is, it's about who is in it.
ReplyDeleteExactly! I am sure there were groups of students in Smarsh's high school who did not condone partying or behaviors found alongside that. It is also all about who the person "narrating" the story is paying attention to. While some schools may have larger percentages of party people, it is evident that Smarsh's focus was on those who engaged in those actions.
Delete-Aislinn Beak
Smarsh’s high school does not sound like the high school I attended. We had our occasional Graduation or summer party, but it was rare in my small town because if an adult heard about a party, they would take it straight to the Sheriff. We would go to small hangouts or drive around every weekend, but it was rare for a big party to happen because word traveled quickly. I think adults are aware of their children's behavior in all aspects, but some tend to ignore it.
ReplyDeleteMy school rarely ever had parties, if we wanted to party we would have to come into either ada or pauls valley. But we definitely had a small group of kids who would all gather at one of their houses and just drink and do dumb stuff. I think, to some degree, that every school has the partying type of kids. But I definitely think that bigger schools have more of a partying issues than smaller schools.
ReplyDeleteFrom the stories I've heard, I believe it is a more wild version of my high school. I never attended any parties, though it does seem to fit the narratives I've been told. It seems to me that urban schools are more wild due to easier access to hard drugs and staff that can easily lose track of an individual student. Graduating with a class of 34 you tend to be where you belong the majority of the time, as it's very easy to notice roughly three percent of your students being absent. Most of the prominent adults in my community were alums, and so I assume they knew exactly what was going on most of the time.
ReplyDeleteIn the tiny town I grew up in, parties were defiantly not uncommon. It was common to see kids drunk or high all the time, and people seen it as normal. I graduated with 6 kids in my class, so word traveled very fast about the parties that were going on. There were parents who were okay with it, parents who strictly forbid it, and parents who frowned upon it but knew their kids were going to go it so they trusted them to call if they needed a ride, with no consequences if they called. My high school was a normal, small town school as far as being wild.
ReplyDeleteThe above post was published by Noah Oates
DeleteMy high school as a whole was definitely tamer. There were definitely groups of kids that drank and partied every time they had the chance, but the majority of students were well behaved. I would personally say that bigger schools are wilder just because of sheer number. In my school of around six hundred students if you convinced a quarter of the school to drink it would not be near as wild as if a school of five thousand convinced a quarter of the students to drink. Adults in my town were very aware of what was going on. Social media gave the adults the ability to know which kids partied and which did not.
ReplyDeleteI would say that my high school was slightly more tame than that. We are a small rural high school, so its pretty country. There were a lot of "pasture parties". we didn't really throw house parties. There were definitely drunk kids throwing up everywhere. And probably sex. But this wasn't like a every Friday night type of thing. They happened occasionally. I never went to one but all of my friends did. For the most part though the students at my school partied in other towns. It was easier that way. I'm sure bigger schools are more wild in the amount of people at the parties. But rural is way more wild. My town is 20 minutes away from the closest police station. And the parents didn't care, they did worse when they were younger. So the kids often were able to do whatever they wanted. The kids looked out for each other though. Everyone knows everyone and their grandmas. That's just how small towns go.
ReplyDeleteIn high school I never really paid much attention to what the other kids were doing. I went to school got what I needed done then went home to take care of what I needed to do there. I am not very sure how my school was. I would hear things go around school and from what I heard people had parties, but they were small and not at all as crazy as Smarsh’s classmates. I feel like the size of the school does not dictate the amount of parties they have it depends on the people. I think adults assumed that kids were being reckless even when they weren’t, sometimes they were right, but they weren’t always.
ReplyDeleteMy high school was honestly just as wild. I attended high school in a college town. College town means college boys, and that is just what every sixteen year old girl thinks she needs. It also meant that there were constantly parties, concerts, bonfires, etc to attend: plenty of opportunities to get intoxicated. At least two girls get pregnant each year of high school there also. Being around college aged kids at that age honestly caused us to grow up quickly in more ways than one.
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