Oftentimes the night before a huge test, I find myself imagining a mystical fairyland. This utopia of my dreams is called public-public high school (as opposed to Uni-public high school).

In public-public high school, you can sit around and do nothing, hang out with super-interesting people every day after school, and have an A+ average without ever studying or doing more than 10 minutes of homework each night.

Then I remember that it doesn’t actually work like that.

While I am sure that there are probably some classes most Uni High students would find incredibly easy at other schools, many of the more advanced classes can be as challenging, if not more so, than the Uni equivalent.

Even if classes at other schools are not what many people would consider “more challenging,” they can certainly be more frustrating or just as stressful as many of the classes we gripe about on a fairly regular basis.

The people I know at other schools usually don’t study as frequently as I do, but they tend to study with much more intensity, vigor, and focus.

While subbies traditionally bemoan having to write their cutting edge paper, many of my friends at other schools would kill to be in a class where you can compare different brands of ice cream or build with balsa wood and razor blades for a school project.

I’ve also noticed that when I have a lot of homework, I conveniently forget that many of my friends have to eat in a cafeteria, and have their lockers searched fairly regularly. They can’t bring iPods to school, wear hats, bring their backpacks to class, do homework in the hallways, flash gang signs in PE, or participate in many of the other activities I enjoy daily.

But my point isn’t, “Look, Uni is so amazing when you think about it, so you should all quit complaining.” My point is that our peers at other schools in the area don’t have it as easy as I, for one, would like to believe that they do.

So next time I want to punch myself in the face after hearing, “Oh, for the first two weeks of chemistry, we made red and blue smiley faces on litmus paper,” I will take a very deep breath and remember that I’ve had a 50-minute period of free time every day for the past two years with which I supposedly crack my slightly larger workload.

That, and I get to ride an elevator that goes almost as fast as if I was walking up the stairs. How cool is that?!