The Big Picture: Mailbag

[bdcjacko]

Maybe it was just me, but high school wasn't bad. I had a friends and a part time job, and things to do and I was by no means a "cool kid." But then again I didn't and still don't let stress get to me all that bad.

 

[blackrave]

High school is tolerable if you remember few things
1. Numbers=strength
2. Fear is their weapon of choice (even when it gets physical)
3. Humor is best way to deal with most things
4. Sooner or later it ends, so don't do anything stupid
So as long as you follow these simple guidelines you should be ok.

 

[Finalplayerryu]

Sorry Bob, Highschool sure does suck, but only if you live in the US. In Austria for example, a bully would get expelled pretty fast if a few complains come in and there is no social pressure from other students.

 

[Hugga_Bear]

Sorry Bob, Highschool sure does suck, but only if you live in the US. In Austria for example, a bully would get expelled pretty fast if a few complains come in and there is no social pressure from other students.

My feelings too. 90+% of the complaints I hear are US based, the majority of the rest of the world seems to be a-okay. I'm from the UK and there were three bullies in my school that I ever knew of, one was expelled, one reformed after about a year (primarily by me) and the other one attempted to bully me, we had an ongoing mini-war for about a year and then he finally backed down and grudgingly backed off trying to hurt others.

As for us and France, well it's more like a sports rivalry but you'll often find them being negatively portrayed, it's mostly tongue in cheek but that can be hard to miss and sometimes it's a genuine negative sentiment, left over from the centuries of war between us and their behaviour in WW2 (which wasn't quite as gallant as modern media portrays).

 

[lowkey_jotunn]

Maybe things have changed a bit in the decade+ since I graduated, but even for a scrawny, geeky, marching bando like me, High School was pretty fun. I had friends in the band, natch, made friends on the football team, since we played their halftime shows, and shared a practice field. In hanging out with the football guys, spent time hanging out with the cheerleaders.

So yeah, good times.

 

[James Ennever]

to amswer Matthew Anderson in th FB comments and to vent some steam

I have no victim complex, And Matthew, How many people did you actually help? The Nuremberg defence is the one most commonly associated with bullies who while in there ivory towers of social acceptance ignore the plight of the downtrodden Allen Probably was berated by people like your friends and you watched, you were just blind to the reality of what you were doing.
If you got through HS with out any emotional scars then congratulations just do not call every one who got mother F#c#%$ PTSD a person with a ?victim complex???.

High school should be abolished.

Or at the very least made optional. There are so many kids in high school that don't care about how well they do there, and would probably be better off going into the work force. They sure aren't interested in getting into college or learning anything more the state has to teach them, so why not just get them working?

1) Because they will probably sincerely regret it later on in life when they're stuck in a dead end job and have little-to-no upward mobility.

2) Because an education isn't just a means to making money but a requisite for being an informed member of a democratic society.

3) Because minors cannot legally make their own decisions for a reason, they're too immature. (This is obviously related to point #1, but is important enough to mention separately.)

4) The state has a say for the same reason that it is illegal to beat or starve your children. Children are people and not property of their parents, but they do not have the full rational capacity to take care of themselves and make their own decisions, so they are reliant upon their parents. The state is there to ensure that their rights are protected.

(Things like the limited education that Amish students get should be illegal, religious freedom doesn't trump a person's right to an education or health care, though it is still very important. That's also why children of Jehovah's witnesses should be given transfusions in spite of their parent's religious views, which is legal in the UK, but not as much in the US.)

Well the hsc is not that hard to get, as long as you can read, add 15 + 70 then you are ready for college in Australia? It is only after college when your marks are what make you?..

 

[Harry Mason]

I don't know, Bob. I think you could maturely handle doing an episode about Lost Girls.

There's certainly enough interesting material there. Look at it as a challenge!

 

[mrhateful]

I went to a nerd focused high school so high school it was some of my best years. It was there are learned how important being yourself is.

 

[Durgiun]

I don't know which high school Bob went to, but mine was rather pleasant. Sure, there was the crazy-ass teacher here and there, but otherwise it was pretty sane and nice. No bullies, no assholes (unless you count the crazy-ass teachers) or rampant stupidity. Just laziness. Lots and lots of laziness.

 

[00slash00]

junior year of high school sucked, senior year was pretty fun, but the rest of high school was just meh. not awesome or terrible, just school. by senior year i wasnt super popular but most people either liked me or felt neutral about me. i was well known amongst people i actually cared about and most people knew my name. a couple times i was singled out by assholes but for the most part high school was just school. i cant really relate to people who loved or hated high school

 

[BaronUberstein]

Hoo, high school is a touchy subject with him it seems. I enjoyed the rest of the episode, but that ending bit left it a bit sour with me. Every time he starts getting really 'angry' about high school, the first thought to pop into my head is "get over it."

Maybe I was lucky or something else, but I really enjoyed high school, and I was certainly a "nerd." Hell, I liked going to school, it meant I could be around my friends and not have to put up with my parents fighting. Then again, I went to a private high school, so there's likely a side of high school I simply don't know.

 

[J Tyran]

What makes "high school" so bad that so many people hate it?

 

[theApoc]

If you honestly think High School was "hell", then you were doing it wrong and you seriously need to get over it. Life in general is what you make it, there are good things and there are bad things, and pretty much the only thing we have control over is how we interpret and react to these things.

Bob has whined about "the popular" kids before and then as now it just seems like a lame attempt to make himself feel better about not being one of "them". The sad part is, that there really isn't a "them". The grass always looks greener but in the end we were all just teenagers with varying degrees of awkwardness and problems.

 

[silver wolf009]

I disagree with that high school comment. Call me a liar, but great times abound mark my high school run. Maybe I just have a great group of friends, or maybe I just haven't succumbed to the ocean of poor grades others around me seem to fall into, but I never found it to be the hellish meat grinder some people paint it as.

 

[bificommander]

I always assumed the attitude of 'LOL France are losers' was due to the big middle finger Charles De Gaul gave the US by, among other things, leaving NATO not too long after the US liberated the country after the one war France completely lost. In WW2 France (and Britain and all other nations in the area) got their ass kicked swiftly in what had been expected to be a protracted and at least evenly matched fight, to the point that half the country was conquered and the other half gave up. Thanks to De Gaul's anti-American nationalism, the US's public opinion might have remembered that last humiliating defeat and forgot the millennium and a half of France being a force to be feared (helped of course by the fact that the US didn't exist for most of that time, combined with the US's tendency to file historical events under either "happened to us or with us" or "unimportant").

 

[wyrmslayer1991]

Bob, I'm writing that last one down for when I ever have kids. They won't believe me or probably even listen, but at least I'll know what to say.

 

[LobsterFeng]

I loved High School, and I was (am) a total dweeb, who made friends with many other dweebs, and did my best to be nice to everyone I could.

 

[Hashime]

Seriously, you used "patriarchy" in one of your videos? Besides that fictional nature of that concept you seemed to imply that males deserved to be portrayed as idiots which it not cool.

 

[DTWolfwood]

best time of my life was in high school... <.<

Also helps that my High School is Fiorello H. LaGuardia, i.e. full of art kids! i.e. no jocks

Still prefer it over my college years. go figure that engineering isn't a girl friendly major like Art was... >.>

 

[JUMBO PALACE]

Wow that was creepy. My laptop crashed right after he read "are you actually evil?"