Missing the Good Ol' Days

In middle school, nobody ever shuts up in class and the teacher always has to tell the room to be quiet. In high school, there is so much drama and cliques and people who think they are all that and rule the school. In college, there is just a whole lot of work to do and it never seems like you are never finished with your homework. Do you ever wish you could go back to elementary school? I’m not talking about just starting all over and doing it all again, but going back for a day or a week or maybe even a month. Looking back, elementary school seems like one of the easiest things I have ever done. Of course, it’s easy for me to say that now since I have seven more years of education under my belt since then, but I didn’t appreciate how relaxed and simple elementary school was until now.

As a whole, we as elementary school students were very innocent and, compared to how many of us are now, mature. We didn’t get online at urbandictionary.com to look up what certain dirty slang words meant; personally, I didn’t even know hardly any slang or cuss words when I was in elementary school. Nobody went out and got caught drinking or smoking weed and got arrested, hurting many chances of a good career. Nobody went around getting laid all the time leading to somebody getting pregnant and then they become the brunt of a lot of jokes around the school. Nobody (as far as I knew) got into any fights in the hallway because one dude looked at another dude’s girl the wrong way. Sure, we talked all the time, like in middle school, but usually we weren’t obnoxious about it and talked just to disrupt the teacher and make a scene. We just hadn’t fully learned that there are times to talk and times to be quiet. I mean, really, by the time we were in 8th grade we should have figured that out already so we didn’t have an excuse then. Most of us were on the same level. We were all trying to develop basic skills like adding, reading, and learning how to socialize well with each other. We had our own little elementary school problems to deal with but I think the majority of them were because we were still very young.

In elementary school, we were free to be our own person without anybody putting pressure on us to change or to do this or that; basically, it was very peaceful especially compared to high school. Even in middle school, most of the grade still dressed similarly so there weren’t as many “groups” of people. By the time high school rolled around, everybody fanned out into their own style or social group. There were the goths and the rednecks and the jocks and the preps and the outcasts and the emo kids and on and on. I am happy to say I didn’t really have a particular social group I was in. I was just friends with anybody and didn’t not talk to somebody just because they were part of this group or that. But anyway, in elementary school everybody was friends with everybody and we all wore our shirts with the trucks on them or the dresses with the fluffy stuff on the sleeves (I wore the shirts with the trucks on them just to erase any confusion). Along with not having the entire grade split up into different social groups, there was no petty drama in elementary school. In high school, even within one social group, one person didn’t like another because the second one dated the first one’s ex or because the first one was standing there talking to the second one’s significant other. There were “boyfriend stealers” and there was the “class slut(s).” (The grade that graduated ahead of me was nicknamed “Sluts ’08”. They were a particularly interesting bunch that’s for sure.) Gossip floated around the school constantly; one story could spread around the entire school within an hour or two. People would go out and do something stupid or try to act all big and bad just because they were in high school. Elementary school was free of all of that for the most part; we just enjoyed being young and being around each other.

Probably the thing I miss about elementary school the most was how easy it was. Again, it seems so much easier to me now that I have learned a whole lot more and have had many difficult classes, but considering we learned how to multiply 2 times 2 and studied that evaporation, condensation and precipitation (I used to think those were such big words) were all part of the Water Cycle, it’s hard to not say that was so simple. I used to hate coming home and having to do homework for an hour and not be able to play with my Legos for that much longer. Oh my goodness! How terrible that I have homework for a whole hour! I don’t know how I made it through elementary school with such a heavy work load. You know, if I had to learn something so simple like derivatives or how to find the arctan of something then it wouldn’t have been much of a problem, but since I had to sit there on the couch and figure out (without a calculator!) what 4 times 3 was, it was almost too much to handle. Plus, we always had to color and draw stuff; we were forced to walk single file to go to gym and music and art. You would think we were prisoners serving out our punishment! Then, there was the whole naptime issue. We thought it was such an ordeal that we had to actually be calm for once and lay our little heads down and relax. Now, I’m almost constantly wishing I could take a nap (I took two today and I could really go for a third right now). We didn’t have to worry about picking out our major and career or choosing just the right classes to take. If you missed class, it usually didn’t matter because all they did was watch a Disney movie or something and then have a party. Many times I have wondered how fast I could get through elementary school with the knowledge I have now. If I started at kindergarten and went all the way to 5th grade, I wonder how long it would take me. I’m thinking maybe a week or two. I can’t remember all of what we did and learned about but, I mean, it can’t be difficult. Sometimes I think that going back to elementary school for a little while would be nice. It would be an easy, peaceful break from the last 7+ years of school that I’ve been through.