The Best (And Worst) Parts Of Your School

Every school has its own unique geography—the nice parts, the gross parts, the parts of those parts that are falling apart. Every room and hallway has a personality, from the bureaucratic, teacher-y feel of the principal's office to the animated, boisterous commons, and then also whatever personality represents broom closets. Probably a grumbly guy with a broom.

The Main Entrance
Even if your school is a rickety disaster, there's always at least one area that doesn't look like it's been blown up, and this is probably it. If you go to an academic powerhouse, this is where you'll find your trophy case, crammed full of dozens upon dozens of trophies whose glimmering brilliance will cause retinal damage if you stare directly at them.

If you just have a bunch of "This School Is Legally Permitted To Operate" certifications, well, that humiliating display will be somewhere around here too. In either case, this is your school at its most presentable.

The Bathrooms
Most high school bathrooms have one thing in common: next to the sinks, you'll find only prison-grade construction paper or hopeless hand dryers that are unable to dry hands. But beyond that, they're all different; you've got your clean, well-kept bathrooms, and then your bathrooms that qualify under the Geneva Convention as a war crime. The filthiest of these, ignored by janitors, teachers, and basic human decency, often house the seedy underbelly of high school society. They're like the Cantina in Star Wars:  full of smoke and shady goings-on. If there's any place where you'd expect to get made fun of by a drunken monster from space, it's here.

The Scary, Terrible Hallway
Not every school has one of these, but if yours does, you know exactly what we mean. Flickering fluorescent lights. Clanky pipe sounds coming from nowhere in particular, but always vaguely behind you. Cracked tile, painted some color that existed in the '70s and no longer has a name, but reminds you of loneliness. Feral dogs wandering aimlessly in search of scraps. The only reason to pass through this creaky labyrinth is to take a hurried shortcut from one class to another. If you were stuck in a teen horror movie, this is the hallway in which you would be assaulted by ghosts.

Facilities
Whether your school is supplying its outdoor glade with fresh unicorns or just struggling to resolve its Too Many Bats problem depends on its finances. If an actual princess gave you billions of dollars, then you probably have computers that can be turned on instead of cardboard boxes that say "computer" on the front. Do you have a nice swimming pool, or a grim experiment in hypothermia and misery? Is your locker room regular-uncomfortable or lawsuit-uncomfortable? Does your lab have working microscopes, or are you staring confused at this sentence, assuming we're accidentally describing CSI right now? This is your chance to register your woe on the internet, which is pretty much all it gets used for anyway.

So tell us, what's your school like? Creepy and cruddy? Full of trophies? A little on the illegal side?

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