So Highschool, it's a place that most of us will have to endure, until we're 18 we get stuck in this place for more than just a few years... Unless you're lucky and you get homeschooled, honestly I don't see any benefit other than access to better tutors and the possibilty of making friends... But even then, the internet exists, and it's been proven that young people learn better from people that they can relate to, in contrast, on average most student's would not be able to relate to their teachers, makig it more difficult. Highschools also limit your freedom greatly, you are stuck on a strict timetable, and the highschool that I went to had an overly strick uniform policy; suit, tie, etc... Honestly it was a bore, moving up to the last 2 year at that place we were actually allowed to wear our own clothes, however the same could not be said for the first five years at that place, and honestly it was a bit depressing.
Let's talk about the "rules" that were set in place for us to "follow"... well... they were enforced upon us, most of them being completely stupid. One of the things that became apparent as soon as you get there is shoes... you HAVE to wear "smart" black leather shoes, even though most jobs no longer care, as long as they're the correct shoes for the job. But I digress, you will get put in detention if you dont wear the correct shoes, another note on the uniform, you HAVE to have your shirt tucked in, No Exeptions! And that too will land you in detention if you do not comply. One thing that personally upset me was the "No Headphones/Earphones" rule that made literally no sense, there was never any real explaination for it, but you guessed it, detention for not complying, and they would be confiscated until the end of the day (Or week if you had one of those cover teacher idiots), The thing is I can understand part of the concern, of which being use during lessons, where really you should be learning, and not messing aropund on your phone or listening to music, but one thing that confused me was that in IT lessons it was perfectly fine, and that they actually wanted you to bring headphones in... I have no idea what that school was thinking, honestly everyone knew that the school was kind of retarded.
Now I'll describe some of the clusterf**k decisions that our school made that really didn't help, actually making people a bit more miffed, one of which was the installation of 5 very large flatscreen TVs around the school... Cool idea and all but all they were used for were as bulletin boards... Bulletin boards that were also showing the exact same information as the regular notice boards around the school, plus these ones had to be networked... They put them in at the exact same time that the school had run out of money for essential items such as glue, books and chairs... many students were not impressed, carrying on from that, earlier they spent almost a third of a million (~$330,000) on LED lights around the school... Yes there is an advantage to doing that, as it saves energy... but they missed out quite a lot of the classrooms, leaving the old fluorescent lamps in place... plus this only brought the school's energy efficiency rating up to a D/A***... So yeah not that much of an improvement. The IT department was given money by the "Higher-ups" for rerasons I dont know, instead of spening the money on obvious improvements, such as a better, more efficient server, they decided to spend the majority of the money on drones, raspberry Pis and other stuff that only benefits the iMedia and Computer science students, rather than the rest of the school as a whole. To carry on with the stupid spending decisions, that highschool decided to spend god-knows how much on expanding the canteen, this in turn reduced mobility around the school as the canteen was built on top of part of the path surrounding the school that also included wheelchair access, and meant that you would have to walk around the building now and down a set of stairs, because of the expansion requirements, the canteen expansion had to be built on top of 25% of the tennis/netball courts, this probably upset the PhysEd department. What would have been useful instead would have been an area for the 8th/9th graders, who didn't have an area, 6th/7th grade and the 10th grade had their own dedicated areas, so naturally the 8th and 9th graders just invaded the canteen... not to mention the 11th grade destroying it every time they went in there, I have no idea why they did that (I was in the 11th grade at the time and had no idea who it was who was doing it).
How about some obvious sexism? for some reason all the female students were restricted to doing girl sports and the male students to boys sports, there was no option for mixed-sex games, or for girls to do boys sports, so while the boys were playing football or rugby, the girls were forced to do dancing, netball, hocky, etc... Stereotypical girls sports. The toilets were also a massive issue in this school, the boys' toilets were almost always 100% destroyed, and were rarely repaired, in the time I was there (7 Years) they only ever repaired them once, other than removing some graffitti every now and then, but that wasn't that often either, one thing that upset us as the male gender was that the girls' bathrooms were almost always kept in good condition, the boys just had to deal with crusty, urine and semen stained urinals with no partitions (those "stainless" steel ones that look like drinking/feeding troughs for animals... yeah those big nasty ones) and toilet cubicals with broken or doors. The water was never hot, the soap dispensers were rusted, crusted and didn't even work, and half of the mirrors had been broken or stolen (I dont know how any of that happened), there is a case study that is always brought up in geography, that if damage is repaired instantly, the chance of more being made is reduced, as people feel less guilty for vandalizing something if they can see that somone has been there before them, so repairing the toilets and removing the graffitti in turn reduces more offences being committed... However this cannot apply for the bathrooms in my old highschool as they were never maintained, if they had applied this case study they may never have to worry about the bathrooms for a lot longer. Across the school there were many bathrooms, a male and female in the humanities block, a male and female in the science block, one male and two female bathrooms near the math/languages block... why there were more female toilets than male toilets I will never know.. though it is a bit biased it if you ask me.
So what about cover lessons, when the actual teacher is busy doing something else, or they're ill? They were terrible, they were so very terrible... From what I can remember there were a bunch of horrible teachers, all of them were horrible people, aggressive, intolerant, short-tempered, etc... Not nice people to have to be taught by, there was one that was "okay", she got nicknamed "squirrel woman/the chipmunk" because she was short and had a bob style haircut, she was nice, but only a cover teacher, lets get on to the real horrible ones, and off the top of my head there were three, one of them was a PhysEd teacher, known as the "Asian Raisin" or "Sultana" (Becuase of the huge and nasty looking mole on his face that was made fun of to no end, and because his name actually sounded a lot like "Sultana"), I can't blame people for wanting to call him that though, and he deserved it, he made you feel scared/uncomfortable, would shout at you to no end, and gave out detentions like there was no tomorrow, the next was a thin, scrawny looking woman, also with a bob, but a much, much worse one, who nobody liked, and has a son in my sister's year that would cause no end of trouble, she was way worse than the asian raisin, made you feel even more uncomforable and would find any excuse for giving out detentions, the last, like the nasty thin scrawny woman, the next cover teacher (also a woman) was probably the worst you could get, she always had a scowl on (also like thin scrawny woman) but would act really sarcastic and offensive at other times, she would put you in detention for breathing, etc, she was fat (not massive/obese, but overweight), super ugly and had even worse hair (which was a bit longer but still curved inwards at the bottom). All of these "teachers" shouldn't have been teaching in a school, all of them were inadequite for the tasks they were given... They straight up couldn't even teach a class, and I would leave the lesson knowning less than I had at the start, they couldn't control a class properly either, making a mess of everything... No one likes them, seriously.
Then there's smoothwall, a stupid-ass piece of software, yes I can understand why you wouldn't want students looking up porn on the school computers, but blocking useful and essential websites, such as certian wikipedia pages that aren't even mature, informative websites, youtube videos and coolmathgames doesn't sit right, plus anything you do is tracked and recorded to the student's name, so EVERYTHING you do is monitored, which is just creepy and not somethign that I am a huge fan of, if they had just disabled the "bad" sites and left everything alone, without requiring a login that would have been nice... But apparently you can't do that, freaking jokes and humor are blocked, I can't access Nathan's toasty technology page... w h y... UserBenchmark is also blocked by smoothwall, so whenever I'm trying to compare CPUs/GPUs to show a friend etc, I can't becuase it is blocked, so I either have to use my own data, or forget it and find an alternative (that doesn't always have the answers).
Other than the stupud spending, terrible bathrooms and horrible cover teachers, and dumb implementation of internet filtering, what can I say about the school? Personally I think my Physics, and Deisgn teachers are nice, my old Biology teacher was also nice, same for Chemistry, pretty much most of the teachers I had in subjects I enjoyed (and even in english, they were quite nice but I just didn't like the subject... English Language/Literature studies are stupid, seriously, there are more useful, language things that we could be learning about, such as advanced vocabulary, and how to properly construct an email/blog, things that would actually be useful) whatever, personally after the first few months at that place every day blended into the next, but with harsher standards, more responsibilities and other stuff that really took a mental toll on everyone there, plenty of people developed depression and anxiety, and I'm not even surprised, the stress of exams and "You need to do well, this is really important", homework and the like, really affected a lot of people... Not great but aparently that's "Normal" for a school... I really think it shouldn't be if I'm honest.