Upon my desk sat a million and one pages all turned upside down or spread haphazardly across the surface of my desk. I yawned while simultaneously throwing my mechanical pencil on my AP Lang book, giving myself away to silent resignation.
I turned to blankly stare at my wall before picking up my phone from my desk. I hit the home button and on the white screen was the time written in bold, black lettering. It was 1:35 in the morning and I’d been sitting doing homework ever since I’d returned from rehearsal which ended at 7 p.m. during what was now the day prior.
I wouldn’t be sleeping this evening and for once that was entirely fine – or so I told myself. In actuality, it was a miserable thought: staying awake for the entirety of an evening merely to appease the thought of maintaining a relatively adequate GPA and a fair amount of extracurriculars.
Admittedly, my schedule was something I loved, but the amount of sleep I was able to obtain was certainly a bit depressing.
For a few moments, I told myself, just for a few moments – I could put my head down and fall asleep, but what happened next was something so comical and unexpected, a dream so peculiar it screamed the insanity of AP courses and class rankings. It portrayed the vindictive nature of students and proclaimed that AP students were incredibly daft.
It was a bloodbath, in every room and every hallway, a bloodbath. The hallways were coated with textbooks from a variety of courses that varied from AP Lit to AP Bio to AP Stats. Students were attacking one another with anything they could find. Two kids were fighting with each other by utilizing spoons. They kept jabbing each other with them for what seemed like hours. To say the least it was comical and largely ineffective.
In another hall there were two boys screaming about who was better based on class ranking, one boy screaming, “Technically, I’m number one in the class so you should really stop complaining about being superior.” The other boy kept screaming “LA LA LA, YOU’RE SO AMAZING, EXCEPT YOU CAN’T FUNCTION WITHOUT MAKING A THOUSAND ERRORS.” In the distance, one could hear someone say “go on without me” as their companion attempted to console them after receiving news that they’d failed.
Teachers hid behind desks and attempted to rectify the situation by shouting of their disappointment and their overall discontent. A tall and slender administrator who resembled English teacher Thomas Grozan attempted to stop the spooning war, while another teacher who resembled science teacher Kelly Agnew waltzed over to the two students who were bickering and attempted to calm them down.
Another administrator screamed at all the other students who were brawling in the halls to “stop [this] nonsense.” A member of The Lariat was marching around to cover the event, as was a reporter from Cowboy Television (CTV) and their camera crew. The whole affair was an explosive testimony to the nature of AP courses.
The Lariat staffer walked up to me and inquired what “my opinion of the whole brawl” was. I looked around as I heard the ricochet of pens bouncing off walls and the echo of more textbooks hitting the tiled floor of the hallway, as I watched students work in a manner to brutalize one another.
“The fact of the matter is,” I said unintentionally frowning. “AP courses teach us to want to be better than the person in the desk next to us. In a sense, it creates healthy competition, but in other regards, it takes away our actual caring for education. It’s no longer about learning as much knowledge as you can, it’s more so about how many credits you could obtain so that you can be the best.” I looked away from the mess behind me and finally acknowledged the individual before me.
“Being the best does little more than encourage a large ego and make people look down upon their fellow students. We are taught to feel superior when in fact we are not. We’re all here to study, whether or not you’re an AP student or someone who chooses to take regular courses, we are all here to learn. So this sense of entitlement is really something which shouldn’t be embraced. Striving to be intelligent or well rounded is good, but this whole ‘brawl in the hall’ is silly.”
At that moment, a ruler flew through the air hitting me in the head, stirring me from this ludicrous reverie.
I was startled because AP courses couldn’t necessarily start out all out warfare but they certainly made for a sort of unsettling competition. If only we could learn to embrace the educational facet of these courses rather than focusing on who stands as the victor, maybe then I’d stop dreaming about my classmates participating in some sort of mediocre “Hunger Games.”
This is a satirical article and should not be taken seriously. It was written with the intent of making people laugh. Any information here is most likely false and should not be quoted as fact. However, if this article is used for anything other than its recreational use, the writer and Cooper City High School claim no responsibility if anyone gets offended, injured or otherwise hurt in any way.
Photo by Lariat photography
