The 100 BEST High Schools in America

[Count Duckula]

To put it as one of my friends did "We have the choice to take those tests, and thats why our school is better."

Either way, it comes down to this... I needed to vent a bit, share my opinion. What do you think?

I had the pleasure of receiving a Virginia education. Still do, in fact.

Some school counselor put me down as having "volatile brilliance" and it's stuck with me ever since. I was canned from the Governor's School (seems to be my equivalent of this IA thing) because my math and math-based science entry scores were too low, while my english and history scores were above-average.

GCS is the school-within-a-school, bringing together the local high schools in an accelerated education program. Basically, that means kids from all over the county are bussed to our school or receive live audio/video feed to take all AP courses. You couldn't pick and choose what you wanted to take in the program; if you enrolled in GCS, you enrolled in everything. Not all of these AP courses are available to kids outside the program, however, but who cared if Average Joe/Jane wanted to take AP European History? The exams for GCS students, however, were optional, while they were mandatory for regular students. GCS had their own talent show, recitals, performances, and ranked their special little darlings with the "regular" graduating class, so their weighted 5.0 GPAs easily claimed the top 30 or so slots in the class rank.

For a while I thought this was sour grapes, and I was just mad that I didn't qualify to get in. But then I got over it. There will always be spectrum differences. That's life. Did I really want to be suffering with the rich kids taking AP Physics instead of all those writing and journalism classes I took instead? Did I really want to deal with the snobbery, the hypocrisy, and the rule bending? (Guess how many of the little darlings were under the influence of illegal-in-one-way-or-another things. C'mon. Guess.)

Naturally, I went to a college where all of this comes back full force. The have-alls get a better quality of education, the have-nones follow the Swipple Rule of Order, one of Murphy's many corollaries ("he who shouts the loudest has the floor"), leaving the rest to take their pickins.

Find your own niche and fight for it, I say.