Tell Me Why

No, this isn't an ode dedicated to any member of the Backstreet Boys, but rather the evolution of things students can and will get away with as the education level rises.  And yes, this is going to be in delicious list style.

1)  Preschool.  Here you can do pretty much whatever you want, and usually it involves you and another infantile victim.  Stealing toys away instead of sharing, throwing sand all over the floor and into people's faces from that cool sand-water box thing, and the typical kicking and screaming.  Oh, and I mustn't forget the occasional swapping of naughty, secret words the grown-ups in our life have shared.  Much like candy i suppose.  And it's not like the higher-educations where you get a detention or a paper yellow triangle on the corner of your desk (fuck you, Mr. Brockway!); no, it's actually a game--push the limits of patience of those sorry supervisors without breaking them.  My mom knows this game all too well.

2)  Kindergarten.  Much the same premise, except you actually have to do work in order to advance so there is an incentive to limit your tyranny.  A horrible, welcome-to-reality incentive.  And the sitting!  I believe it is at this time where the government starts passing out amphetamines (much like candy I suppose) to those little tykes who just can't sit still, or in my case can't stop standing on his desk.  I miss preschool so much.

3)  Elementary School.  By now they expect you to know how to act like a person, but the problem is no one knows what that means.  If our moms can act one way and that kid humping the tree on the playground another and those really tall kids hanging around the dumpster smoking joints yet another...might as well give up trying to learn on your own.  So you revert back to kindergarten and leave it up to the teachers.  If that doesn't work?  Brace yourself for the looming walk to the principal's office.  Despite the 'pal' part of his name he is definitely not your friend, and unlike the nice doctors he does not pass out candy--but you have no choice but to hang onto every single word he says.  Count yourself lucky if you can breathe long enough to see your way back out of that big oak door.

4)  I'm skipping middle school and high school for the time being.  I'll include it when I update it later.  Read on and you'll find out why.

5)  College.  Just like the prices of whatever drug predilection you have, the level of possible skulking varies from region to population to teachers (region to ghetto to drug dealer).  My prior college, James Madison University, will have teachers breathing down your neck in the smaller classes, but once you start increasing the population almost anything goes.  The laptops come out, the phones never get a rest, and at one point I saw two people throw a foam football around the lecture room--i believe they were twenty or so feet apart.
    But at the community college level?  Well, where do you think I'm typing this?  I figured a class as complex as Fluid Mechanics and Hydraulics would chew you out for anything out of line, particularly for blatant laptop use, but then I remember that I'm in a school that precedes the word "community" and I stop wondering.  I don't even think it's possible to see the principal: do we even have one?  Things I still don't know despite having gone to college for almost a year and a half.