The Horrors of High School

For this experience, I will be going back to my senior year of high school. That year, my friend and I kept up with all the clubs and activities because of how much fun we had the year before. Student government that changed so much, that it became overwhelming for a small group of us (four of us who ended up with everything). Planning events turned out to be more of a chore than anything else. It was as if there was an invisible checklist for the planning process. A of people (mainly the president and her friends[for this group I’m just going refer to them as *president*] ) come up with the script and plays the main roles in the assembly, while a smaller group (me and my friends) gets stuck running around for supplies, making posters, and filling in the details. What kind of details you ask? Getting supplies, running the sound system, checking dates with the moderators, and cleaning up. Don’t get me wrong here, I don’t mind cleaning up after the school events (ripping up the posters is a great stress reliever) but doing so with a small group of people, while others are sitting around doing nothing.... That is a different story.

(I know that this will turn out to be a rant, so feel free to skip this paragraph, maybe skim the next and really start reading the paragraph after that). For the annual Christmas school assembly someone (who only goes to the meeting once a month), came up with the idea to throw ‘snow’ off of the catwalk (up high, over the audience section) to make it seem like it is snowing in the theater… So, the week before, my friends and I went around the school emptying out the hole-punchers for snow while the *president* stays in the office, and ‘iron out the details’ on the script of the assembly. The morning of the assembly, no one in *president* was there to help set things up, instead they stayed in the office to work on the details some more. So, my friends and I ended up setting everything up with the help of the moderators. The actual assembly turned out pretty good for the most part. The people sitting near the front loved the snow, while the people in the back wondered why they did not have any snow…. Little technical difficulties that came up as the plans were put into motion. Other than that, everything else went smoothly. Once the theater emptied out, my friends and I cleaned up what we set up that morning and went to lunch (we had lunch time right after the assembly and class afterwards). We were done…. right?

About ten minutes into our lunch, the student body president marches up to our table, demanding to know what my friends and I were doing, eating lunch instead of cleaning up the theater. The clean up details for this event got left out of the planning stage (AGAIN!!), so she has to walk around and get people back to help clean up the mess in the theater. We thought we already did, turns out she meant cleaning up all the snow from the seats, because another school was coming in at the end of the day to use our theater… Most of us assumed that the rest of clean up will take place after school, when we would have more time clean. Nope, we had to go clean up right this moment. So my friends and I left our lunch with some other friends and went to work. Half way through the lunch period, the president had to stop because she was getting sick from the dust. So she and her friends go to the office to ‘clean up’. That left the five of us (me, three friends and the moderator) to clean up the mess while sneezing our heads off (turns out 3 people are like me, we sneeze a lot when it gets dusty). We were not really done when we decided to stop cleaning. Our teacher (my friends and I have the same class after lunch) was waiting for us, before he wanted to start teaching because of how important the lesson was. The moderator decided to give all of us a break, and stop there. When we get to the office to pick up our stuff, turns out when we were cleaning, the *president* were busy having a party in the office, and made a bigger mess out of the stuff than was there originally.

During all of that, I know for sure I was not really open-minded, because I was so angry at some of the people. Now, looking back (thank you for letting me get that out of my system), I learned a lot from that experience, and from later events that stem from this original one. It has helped me develop being open-minded more. Not only reminding me that open-mindedness includes listening to other people’s views and opinion, but their interpretation on different events/directions. Now, when I ask other people to do things, I try to make sure to show them how much I appreciate it. Or, if it is something that needs a group of people, I try to stay and do the work with them. That year alone taught me how humble people in student government (or any one with some power) can be. No matter how hard one tries to plan things, the plans fall part, and how hard it is to please everyone in a group of people. While this experience is not one of my favorite moments in life so far, I feel that I have learned a lot from it. I have learned how I do not want to treat people, reminded how easily responsibilities can be forgotten, and how humility can help pull people together sometimes.

It is now a little easier for me to remember that the world does not revolve around me. Even before the clean up event, I do not think I was really self-centered but now, I feel that I am more aware of the people around me. To try to put the needs of the people around me before focusing too much on what I want/need. From this experience, I realized how important it is to consider how the people around me will see/think about my actions before actually acting.