Staff Rants

On Advocating For and Against an All-Girls Education

By Anna de la Rosa, Deputy Culture Editor

I’m forever indebted to my parents for spending the extra money to send me to a private Catholic all-girls institution. By not constantly worrying about my appearance, I went months without shaving, doing my makeup and fixing my hair, and left high school with a stellar GPA and what seemed like a never-ending list of extracurriculars.

But I also left with a stunted ability to interact with the opposite sex. Sure, we had a brother school, and I had guy friends in outside clubs, but boy was it a change coming to NYU and seeing guys every day and in my classes. Because of my deeply rooted Catholic school background with nuns shaming me for skirt lengths too short, I had been conditioned to automatically assume that “boys are the Devil” and “they only want you for your body.” The first month in college was hard as I learned to move past these alarm bells in my mind. But now that I’ve found a really good group of guy friends, I can say with certainty that not all boys are bad.

On the Uselessness of Lockers

By Melanie Pineda, Opinion Editor

My high school was gigantic, to say the least. It had over 3,000 students, and my graduating class alone was over 700 kids. I had never even heard of the people in front of and behind me when they lined us up alphabetically on graduation day. The school itself was complicated to navigate even after four years there. For these reasons, lockers were arguably the most useless thing that my high school could have given us. The typical cutesy decorations like posters and mirrors I’d see hung up on lockers in TV shows were a lie. After freshman year, most of my classmates didn’t even know where their locker was, let alone use them. Most friend groups would meet up around the rare locker that one person actually used for the sole purpose of having a hangout spot, blocking the rest of the hallway in the process — although that could be a whole rant in and of itself. So not only were they a waste of space, but they inconvenienced everyone else too. I promise you that the hierarchy of high school wouldn’t have collapsed if they’d just moved the lockers out of the way to actually make room for students.

On High School Lunches

By Sarah John, Deputy Opinion Editor

I feel like we should all take a second to reflect on how deeply awful public school food can be. High school was horrible (Pre-Calculus changed me forever, and not in a good way) but the terrible food often added insult to injury. Let me set the scene: you are about to walk into a class 20 minutes late, holding the assignment for that day that you just finished. You have stress-cried three times on the way already, some of which was —  despite your best efforts — public. To make it all worse, you have one option for food before your walk of shame into this classroom, and it’s the student store. Yes, that’s right. You’re sad, you’re exhausted and now you’re also eating Cup Noodles for breakfast at 2 p.m. That, my friends, is what we call rock bottom — personally delivered by our very own American education system.

On the Lack of Senior Privilege

By Lauren Gruber, Deputy Copy Chief

Once upon a time, my high school allowed seniors with licenses to drive off campus during our lunch periods. Then, this privilege was taken away, supposedly because of an incident involving prom and marijuana brownies. Being the rebels we were, my friends and I would sneak off campus to get our afternoon fix of bacon, egg and cheese bagels and coffee from the local cafe. This flew under the radar smoothly until teachers began cracking down and gave my friend three detentions when she was caught red-handed entering the building with a coffee cup. Paranoia ensued as the teachers threatened to use the security cameras to catch us in the act. It turned into an epidemic — detentions turned into suspensions, fights were started and war broke out — all because some students wanted some midday coffee.

Staff Raves

On the Nostalgia of it All

By Hanna Khosravi, Opinion Editor  

I loved my high school! It is as simple as that. I loved my English teachers and every classic, coming-of-age experience we had in classrooms with “The Great Gatsby” and “The Scarlet Letter” and James Baldwin and John Steinbeck. I loved the backlog of the hour-long parking lot traffic jam after sixth period, the somewhat questionable vehicular maneuvering and the time spent dawdling away in the passenger’s seats of friends cars or under parking lot solar panels long after the lot itself had emptied in those hours between the end of the school day and before the resumption of our outside lives. I loved flocking to the library at lunch when it rained — I went to high school in California, so if you want a point of reference for how my open-air campus looked, consider “Easy A” or “Lady Bird”. I loved the late nights spent at my high school newspaper office, the camaraderie, the breath of relief after completing an AP exam, the books we read, the rush of running off campus and back within the 45-minute lunch period, the excitement of feeling so much and learning so much for the first time. So cheers to those four funky years, eternally immortalized by ’80s movies and the awkward ID photos on our first drivers licenses. Because, hey, it was all pretty great.

Opinions expressed on the editorial pages are not necessarily those of WSN, and our publication of opinions is not an endorsement of them.

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