I went to a totally normal high school and found it to be way more time-consuming and stressful than college. 7+ hours in school and one to two hours of homework much of it due the very next day plus some longer-term stuff you really ought to be working on? It was a very rare day in college when classes, coursework, and studying combined college took up 9 entire hours, and often it was way under that. High school was pretty much always 8 hours, minimum, five days a week. College was so much easier it was kinda shocking. Especially the required 1xx level classes outside my major, which comprised so much of my first year. It was like a vacation.
My high school was horribly inefficient, in other words, which ended up being stressful. I gather this is the norm. Meanwhile adults were telling me those were the best years of my life—I mean I wasn't really bullied and had a pretty decent high school experience and now that I'm older I sorta get what they meant but god damn, if that'd actually been true I should have offed myself. The "real world", and college, are easier than high school, which was difficult mostly because it was both hyper-authoritarian and wasted phenomenal amounts of time.
My high school was horribly inefficient, in other words, which ended up being stressful. I gather this is the norm. Meanwhile adults were telling me those were the best years of my life—I mean I wasn't really bullied and had a pretty decent high school experience and now that I'm older I sorta get what they meant but god damn, if that'd actually been true I should have offed myself. The "real world", and college, are easier than high school, which was difficult mostly because it was both hyper-authoritarian and wasted phenomenal amounts of time.