Watching movies about growing up you tend to get this idea that once you hit a certain level of maturity and a certain grade that things are just going to start happening. The person that was the ugly duckling in grade school and middle school will start to blossom and be totally hot, the awkward person will be this suave, cool dude or girl that everyone wants to hang around, and life in general will slowly but surely become this great and wonderful existence that you can’t wait to have and won’t want to end.
Hollywood certainly knows how to fool us doesn’t it? For most of us once we hit that level the truth finally came up and walloped us so hard we probably had a comical look of shock once we landed firmly on our butts.
Growing up is almost nothing like it is in the movies, and here’s five things that films tend to get wrong.
5. There is no one way to navigate through high school.
You will mess up at one point. You will run afoul of the wrong person, and you will make mistakes that will be noticed by others and create a situation that you have to think yourself out of. The difference is that you don’t have the two hours it would take to solve any and all of your problems so that your high school experience could get better. You have an entire school year to set things right, and you’ll probably need every minute you get.
4. The established stereotypes are not as common as they used to be.
There are still jocks, nerds, stoners, skaters, and other cliques. But more often than not these days they will intermingle with one another in an effort to show some form of solidarity. The football team will tend to have a few guys that could be seen as nerds, the cheerleaders could have girls that are seen as more academic, and so on and so forth. The social landscape of high school is a much different experience now.
3. It’s never a good idea to challenge the teachers, or the principal.
In movies you see kids do this and get suspended or even expelled, but in some cases that’s only the beginning. The more you challenge a teacher or a principal and the more you prove yourself to be a disciplinary case the more likely it is that you will be forced to endure some other form of punishment at some point, such as being enrolled in alternative school or even put in a juvenile detention center if you take things too far.
2. Teachers are more reliable than movies tend to show.
Part of growing up is being able to depend on your educators. They see you for a good chunk of the day and as a result have a huge impact on your development. In many movies teachers are lackadaisical and don’t really seem to care about anything other than getting through the school year so they can enjoy their summer. In real life a good many of them are care more supportive.
1. The older you get, the more you will be forced to compromise.
A lot of movies seem to enjoy pushing the idea that kids know how to figure things out, will always get by in some manner befitting of a dramatic and even comedic film, and will be okay at the end. Life would be so great if that was the case. As we grow up we realize very quickly that what we want to do is very different from what we HAVE to do. One day you wake up and need to be able to understand that what you want isn’t what you need, and in order to get what you need you’ll have to make a compromise that could end up giving you less of what you want. It’s a vicious cycle that many adults have had to adapt to, but it happens.
Growing up is not like it is in the movies, not one bit.
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