Pros/Cons of small Schools plus an anecdote about my Spanish adventures (Day 16)

I go to a pretty small school in all respects.
I have 60 in my class, but most of the other grades have about 50.
Pros: you know everyone in your school on a more personal level, especially those in your grade.
At one point or another, your paths have crossed. Even though we’ve drifted now, many of the girls, at different intervals, have been my best friends in one way or another.
We know things about one another normal people wouldn’t know, just random trivia actually, and have a pretty good understanding of who everyone is. (there isn’t a whole lot of pressure to conform at my school, to well, anything, there just aren’t enough of us for peer pressure)

Cons: you’ve been with these people your entire life, so when a new kid comes, we pounce.
And it’s not just a gradual thing, literally, the first day the person is there, we all know:
First name
Last name
Last school
Previous homes
Boyfriend/girlfriend status
If they have any connections of friends or family to our school
And why they left their last school, good or bad.

It’s quite interesting. I think we should use my school as the test subjects for a scientific study on how fast news can travel, even without the use of cell phones or media. Just plop a new kid next to us in class and we’ll show you how fast we work

We’ve gotten so good at this system that you don’t even hear the information twice.
You know who tells you everything, who told them, and who you need to tell. And it’s all unspoken.
It’s like a complicated, never ending game of telephone.

There is another con to this small school environment, I mean, it’s great knowing your teachers, having them for multiple years, you know almost everyone by name, but that’s just it.
There’s no change.
This makes dating very hard.
It almost rules it out completely because you know these people. They are not your romantic interests. You didn’t meet them on the bus, or at the game, or through anything of interest of you.
You know if they wet their pants in grade school.
You know how many times they’ve thrown up in class.
If you’re into the menz, I think I’ve seen almost all of them either throw something up, or shoot something out of their noses. Multiple times. Sometimes at the same time. Can you imagine how this could be a turn off?
And the girls. You’ve seen them stab almost everyone in the back, and if you haven’t then they’re your friends. (well, my friends. I tend to surround myself with good people. It works)
And you don’t date your friends.

We have a concentration of people without any variable for change.

What I’m basically trying to say is.
I need to meet new people.
I basically haven’t since kindergarten, unless they’re in 4-H or are friends of my current friends.
It’s quite sad.
It’s to the point now where some of my friends don’t even know how to react around people who don’t understand their inside jokes about stupid things like….burying each other in gravel back in fifth grade. Or that time we all hid in the woods just to piss off the gym teacher. (Who still brings that up)

Oh well. This just means that college gets to be that much more of a new experience.
For all of us.

Small anecdote from the day: (that doesn’t have to do with me going 10 seconds over my time limit on my English speech)

I have this spanish teacher and she is EXTREMELY SCARY.
She would be a lovely person if I wasn’t in her class, but as of now she is EXTREMELY SCARY.
It requires all caps.
She’ll give you an hour and a half of detention in her room if she catches you with a hat on more than twice (good thing I can’t pull off hats.) she scares everyone into studying because tests are extremely hard, vague, and could be sprung on you at anytime, and…it’s just something about her where you’re afraid if she starts yelling at you, or even looks at you weird, that your head might explode from the overflowing of possibilities running through your mind of what she might be thinking to do to you.

And today, after she had lent me her keys so I could get my hard copy of my Spanish brochure from her room, I got them stuck in her door.
And she is extremely touchy about both her room, and her key chain.
So I was pretty much committing a double offense.
And I was scared.
I tried wiggling the key, I try unlocking the door and locking it again, I tried turning the handle, I tried…well, if you can think of it, I pretty much tried it.
And then I heard her down the hall.
So I started to panic.
I knew she was talking, so I had less than 3 minutes to find a teacher to help me.
I raced through the bandroom in the middle of a class to locate her, then went back down the hallway, knocking on doors.
No one in the science room
No one in Industrial arts.
Everyone had gone to get icecream for A and B honor role (which I was on, so I was missing icecream during this fiasco as well)
But just then, I saw the healthroom light was still on.
Now, I hate health, and the teacher’s kind of mean, (she was the elementary gym teacher) so generally, we like when that room light is off.
But for this one moment, this one tiny moment, this room finally became useful.
I knocked, got an answer, and got the keys out of the door just in time as my Spanish teacher rounded the corner on the hall.

So today I learned that, even though we don’t like health, we must respect the fact that no one needs the teacher during resource hour. And also, that she was good with locks.