If I could start up a small topic, I'm going to discuss things that as a kid I hated but in retrospect am glad were around.
1. Mandatory Test Signing - More so if you had a C or worse, ESPECIALLY if you got a D or F. This always pissed me off because I knew getting grounded was inevitable and my mother would go off on me, no matter what I said, telling me that I'm not applying myself, even if the test was hard. Also to be honest, I didn't like my mother "nosing in my business" and frankly, my grades were a big part of that. I even made the bone-headed move of waiting until nearly midnight on a Sunday to show her an F I got on a test because I had to get it signed. End result? Grounded a week instead of just for the weekend.
2. School in General - Let's face it; most kids hate school. I was one of them, although my reason for hating it was mostly just other kids and being bullied a lot for being overweight, prone to anger outbursts and looked down upon for my disability. During the middle school years (6th-8th), my grades slipped from A's and B's to C's and D's, but I just didn't give a damn. I was grounded religiously and I was bitter from that and all the bullying that nobody did anything about. I can get beat up and shoved by a group of kids, even assaulted by wet paper towels in the bathroom, but just calling them a name once made it okay for the principal to ignore any complaints about them?
Also with school, kids don't even have an option to go to school or not; it's mandatory by law. But at least half the kids in school frankly don't want to be there, and their behavior reflects it. Being destructive, rude and laughing in the face of authority, dropping the F-bomb and racial slurs like you're supposed to be saying "Please" and "Thank you". What kills me is that teachers are forced to deal with such children, but a teacher can't retaliate AT ALL. Cursing back at the kid = goodbye job. Hitting the kid? Hello assault charges! It's just really disturbing when a 6 year old goes up to her teacher, flips her off, drops a few F-bombs and calls her all the offensive names women get.
Anyway, all that ranting aside, high school was, for the most part, when everything began to work out for me. I'm glad I turned my god-awful grades around. Consider that in 8th grade, I was at the point I was failing THREE core subjects and just barely passing the one I'm best at (Algebra) because I was lazy and didn't do any of the homework. I think I found solace talking with the teachers and doing my best to make my mark in high school is what helped me most. I had a lot of lost ground to make up for, and that attitude landed me on the "top 10% of graduating class" list and rank 46 out of 476 graduates for overall grades (with no weighted courses no less). College, despite not really helping me in terms of job pursuit, really made me become a lot more open-minded and want to critically assess things. I also think it made me a lot more professional overall, even if that professional mind set is being wasted pushing carts.
So what are things you guys hated as kids but don't now that you're older / an adult? I said older because I know a decent chunk of the community is under 18, and even the younger group could have a few things that they didn't like when they were younger that they do now.
