Thought I'd post this:

Neal Boortz: Rules for High School Students

I’ve been on a real tear lately about government schools. I get on you parents not because I am trying to stir the puddin’ but because I am genuinely concerned about the future of this country. And let’s face it, your children deserve better. So a Twitter follower of mine reminded me of this great list I stumbled across awhile back. I found it in a book by Charles J. Sykes called Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can't Read, Write, Or Add. So here we go …

Rule No. 1: Life is not fair. Get used to it. The average teen-ager uses the phrase "It's not fair" 8.6 times a day. You got it from your parents, who said it so often you decided they must be the most idealistic generation ever. When they started hearing it from their own kids, they realized Rule No. 1.

Rule No. 2: The real world won't care as much about your self-esteem as much as your school does. It'll expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself. This may come as a shock. Usually, when inflated self-esteem meets reality, kids complain that it's not fair. (See Rule No. 1)

Rule No. 3: Sorry, you won't make $40,000 a year right out of high school. And you won't be a vice president or have a car phone either. You may even have to wear a uniform that doesn't have a Gap label.

Rule No. 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait 'til you get a boss. He doesn't have tenure, so he tends to be a bit edgier. When you screw up, he's not going to ask you how you feel about it.

Rule No. 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping. They called it opportunity. They weren't embarrassed making minimum wage either. They would have been embarrassed to sit around talking about Kurt Cobain all weekend.

Rule No. 6: It's not your parents' fault. If you screw up, you are responsible. This is the flip side of "It's my life," and "You're not the boss of me," and other eloquent proclamations of your generation. When you turn 18, it's on your dime. Don't whine about it, or you'll sound like a baby boomer.

Rule No. 7: Before you were born your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way paying your bills, cleaning up your room and listening to you tell them how idealistic you are. And by the way, before you save the rain forest from the blood-sucking parasites of your parents' generation, try delousing the closet in your bedroom.

Rule No. 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers. Life hasn't. In some schools, they'll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. Failing grades have been abolished and class valedictorians scrapped, lest anyone's feelings be hurt. Effort is as important as results. This, of course, bears not the slightest resemblance to anything in real life. (See Rule No. 1, Rule No. 2 and Rule No. 4.)

Rule No. 9: Life is not divided into semesters, and you don't get summers off. Not even Easter break. They expect you to show up every day. For eight hours. And you don't get a new life every 10 weeks. It just goes on and on. While we're at it, very few jobs are interested in fostering your self-expression or helping you find yourself. Fewer still lead to self-realization. (See Rule No. 1 and Rule No. 2.)

Rule No. 10: Television is not real life. Your life is not a sitcom. Your problems will not all be solved in 30 minutes, minus time for commercials. In real life, people actually have to leave the coffee shop to go to jobs. Your friends will not be as perky or pliable as Jennifer Aniston.

Rule No. 11: Be nice to nerds. You may end up working for them. We all could.

Rule No. 12: Smoking does not make you look cool. It makes you look moronic. Next time you're out cruising, watch an 11-year-old with a butt in his mouth. That's what you look like to anyone over 20. Ditto for "expressing yourself" with purple hair and/or pierced body parts.

Rule No. 13: You are not immortal. (See Rule No. 12.) If you are under the impression that living fast, dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse is romantic, you obviously haven't seen one of your peers at room temperature lately.

Rule No. 14: Enjoy this while you can. Sure parents are a pain, school's a bother, and life is depressing. But someday you'll realize how wonderful it was to be a kid. Maybe you should start now. You're welcome.

 

I agree completely.....

but.... car phones, Kurt Cobain, and Jennifer Aniston?


-Dave L

 

Excellent!

 

Well, it needs a little updating:


Cell phones, Lady Gaga, and Miley Cyrus. (Or whoever People and US magazine are talking about these days.)

 

Rule NO 1. TIMING. I WAS 13 AT THE BIRTH OF ROCK AND ROLL. six years later I found Opera in Italy when in the Navy. Life is one incident after another. You set the path with personal integrity. Gary

 

should be required reading on the first day of 9th grade, refresher on graduation night

 

Good stuff Mark. Thanks for sharing.

 

Agree to almost all of the given rules! They are quite reasonable and right, especially the one about smoking) Had much fun reading this, thanks!

 

This absolutely applies to this "everybody wins" generation.

 

Much the same for me. Only diff was I was get'n shot at in Vietnam. There is a life experance for ya.

 

Who's Kurt Kobain?

 

I think he's the guy driving this car up Blood Mountain...

SouthFaceBloodMtn.wmv - YouTube

 

Neil Boortz is still on the air ? Amazing.
I haven't heard from him since I left Hotlanta 8 years ago.... ( 2 blessings : no Atlanta, no Boortz )

How I escaped after 20 years of listening to him on the daily commute ( if you can call Atlanta bumper-cars a commute ) without becoming a Liberterian myself is still a miracle.

BUT ! I do agree with the stated rules, wish I had had a set of those back in the day ......

 

While I do agree with most of the rules, I disagree with the whole public school debate.
Everyone blames schools and teachers for the poor crop of current youth, but it is still the parent's responsibility to raise them. It is not so much the "everybody wins" generation as it is the "its everybody's fault but mine" generation.
Remember, schools didn't get soft and easy so everyone could breeze through. They got that way because parents complained that it was too tough. So maybe we should place some of the blame on the parents of the current youth.(Those doing most of the complaining)

On another note, pizzaguy you are only 1 town over(I'm in Buford) why have I never noticed this before?

 

If you really are only 24, you are wise beyond your years.

I just moved here last November, from Giffin, GA!

 

Thanks.

Welcome to the neighborhood! I've been here for about 12 years.

 

Gee Pizza , thats a good post - car phone and all. I like the everyone wins comment the flip side is that everyone also looses, get used to it. Well done posting that . Woody

 

I think he wrote that around 2000 - times sure are changing fast.

What the hell is a "car phone"?

 

Got my first "car phone" in 85 or 86. I had a 3 year lease at $96 a month.

 

What they dont tell you at graduation, another cut at describing life. Enjoy Woody

Here’s what they really don’t tell you.

1) Next year, you will probably be unemployed, or live in your parents’ basement, or be unemployed and live in your parents’ basement. This is not cruel. It is factual. Fifty percent of new graduates are either unemployed or underemployed. And 29 percent of 25-to-34 year-olds live in what the poll-taker was kind enough to refer to as “multi-generational living arrangements” rather than “your mother’s basement” or “your old room with all the anime posters and Admiral Ackbar figures carelessly splayed on every surface.” You will probably have the urge to respond to this by going to graduate school. Why not? Your only areas of expertise so far are “lacking marketable skills” and “having lots of debt,” so this is a logical next step. Later, when your six friends who did manage to find jobs after college wind up getting booted from the workforce, they will be unable to compete ever again because everyone around them will have six PhDs, at least one of them in a useful field that does not include “Medieval” in its name.

2) You will keep in touch with friends, but not the ones you thought. Of the friends who were so obviously friends for life that just before graduating you lovingly tattooed each other’s names across your faces, some will stay in touch and others won’t. But this is okay. That person from middle school you never talked to will wind up in the same city and turn out to know good places to play Skeeball, and a few years later you might wind up in each other’s weddings. Speaking of weddings. . .

3) When you hit a certain point in your 20s, everyone around you starts to get married, for no apparent reason and without any warning. This is first cute, then alarming, like Justin Bieber. First you go to one wedding. “This is nice,” you say to yourself. “Open bar!” Then suddenly it’s like popcorn kernels. Several start popping at once. Poofy white things surround you, along with the vague smell of burning. “This is fine,” you say to yourself. “They are my friends and I am happy for them! Open bar!” Then by your sixth or seventh you become the disgruntled person wandering from table to table in unsteady new heels muttering that “You know, all relationships end in break-ups or in death.” On the bright side you stop being invited shortly after that.

4) In life, no one rewards you for performing mundane tasks. You do not get gold stars for cleaning your shower. Most effective cleaning product commercials are based upon the false premise that a bald man or anthropomorphic sponge will give you a high-five once you finish grouting the tile. This is seldom the case, unless you accidentally inhaled some of the cleaning product as you worked.

5) Regardless of anything the rampant college hookup culture has taught you, you are suddenly expected to Start Going On Dates. You are no longer you; you are a Single Person who needs to Find a Human Companion, if only so he can accompany you to weddings. This leads to actual dates, with actual people, where you have to sit at restaurants with or without tablecloths and talk about your hobbies and/or interests. Otherwise you’ll wind up at the candy shower alone! That’s a fate worse than halitosis! (Adulthood consists of the creeping realization that the events you thought romantic comedies made up to generate conflict actually happen.)

6) Something strange happens to music as you age. You can remember more and more of it, and you notice that the hip youngsters around you cannot. This is deeply alarming. Before you age out of the coveted 18-to-24 demographic, take as many audience preference surveys as you can so that you can continued to enjoy entertainment for a few years after your views cease to be relevant.

7) Being young isn’t everything, but it’s a good thing. Life can be divided into two sections: the years when you know that if you fall over you are unlikely to break a hip, and the years when you’re not so sure. Enjoy your time in the first half! You are probably going to live a long time, thanks to modern medicine. Of course, you will spend most of your life trying to fund your parents and grandparents’ elaborate health and retirement benefits, benefits premised on the basic belief that they will never die and that until they do, they deserve to live in a style generally reserved for absolute monarchs of the 18th century. Voting will not change this. They outnumber you. So what I mean is: Make those weekends count!

8) As Cynthia Heimel says, “There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on earth. So what the hell, leap.”

9) You have no idea how personal finance works. Actually. There are only two things that your education should have taught you: how to deal with having money and how to deal with not having money. (“Go to grad school?”) It has taught you neither. Instead, you know the names of Renaissance poets and different things you can do with ribosomes in the privacy of your home. People have offered Millennials financial literacy tests and their only conclusion is that we have no idea what to do with money. Save it? Spend it? Invest it in something that will accrue in value over time, like ironic wall-paintings of Michael Jackson? Who knows? You had better figure it out quickly, though, before someone arrests you for tax fraud.

10) Some days will be better than others. Some days will be worse than others. If you are lucky enough to be graduating now, you will have the creeping sense that all your worries fall under the heading of First World Problems. “No one who owns this many sweaters is entitled to be unhappy,” you will tell yourself. This is wrong. Let yourself be unhappy because it will tell you what needs fixing. When your body feels pain, it alerts you that something is wrong. If the 1950s taught us anything, it is that you can only spend so much time pretending to be contented before you rupture something.

11) No one in book club has ever read the book