Teen Talk: Teenhood Today: 'Gap year' offers taste of reality

When I was in fifth grade, I watched too much of the Disney Channel. For those of you who are not familiar with the cultural hotspots of the modern "tweenage" demographic, the Disney Channel hosts a slew of television shows that star 19-year-old actors and actresses pretending to be 17-year-old high school students, all of which are designed exclusively for audiences younger than 14.

From watching the Disney Channel, I inferred that high school is a series of hallways lined by classroom doors that the extraordinarily attractive students of the school rarely, if ever enter _ they're much too busy getting into all sorts of family-friendly shenanigans and doing cocaine. Homework. Those crazy Hollywood kids and their homework.

At no point in my childhood was I ever informed that high school is not, in fact, a gay romp through achy-breaky-heart relationships and teenage shenanigans that only by chance takes place in a strange building full of lockers and an occasional textbook prop. I was told that once you made it to 12th grade, the horizon was lined by only homecoming, prom and the senior class prank; the concept of doing work in high school _ quite a lot of work _ was left on the cutting-room floor.

I was lied to.

Senior year is not a gay romp through fun times with friends and garnering the courage to ask someone out.

High school is not a series of hallways lined by mysterious and unused lockers. High school is an institution where unsuspecting students are harbored with a workload that doubles with each new grade. By the time a student reaches senior year, he or she is running flat-out. Unfortunately, he or she is also running on empty; whatever enthusiasm and sense of childhood the student may have started out with has been smothered by the twin yokes of college applications and six college-level classes _ the think tank's empty.

Welcome to adulthood, boys and girls.

To be an ambitious high school senior is to know that there are never enough hours in the day. Every 12th-grader works three jobs: high school student (or, due to the advanced level of many senior classes, college student), college counselor and actor _ the actor's duty is to act as though the maintenance of some sort of social life and mental stability doesn't interfere at all with the other two jobs. The actor occasionally takes a few days off; this is what is known as a nervous breakdown.

Theoretically, the senior high school student is faced with only one more year of life as he or she knows it. After graduation, the theoretical high school student is released into a world of eight-hour shifts, paying taxes, and the quest to find another theoretical high school student with whom to pump out eight or nine or 10 little high schoolers-to-be. The theoretical high school student is a (wo)man of duty, of principle, of an eventual future as one of the Joe Sixpackers who chums around with Sarah Palin while she's running down wolves in helicopters for the sake of this grand old nation of ours.

The theoretical high school student population began its death spiral around World War II.

An 18-year-old entering the workplace fresh out of high school is no longer the cultural norm in middle-class America. Nowadays, students of every flavor ship themselves off to college for another four (or five, or six) years. However, the "educational" portion of the college experience is not always taken into account by these would-be Phi Beta Kappa Omega Ciaobella alumni; as a guidance counselor might say to a slacking 11th-grader:

"What do you want to do after you graduate?"

"Drink."

"Don't you mean go to college?"

"I already said drink."

Nevertheless, the majority of college students manage to claw their way through four more years of memorizing chemical formulas and being ordered to care about the hidden meaning of the color of Dimmesdale's socks in The Scarlet Letter. In the 21st century, a college degree is no longer a leg-up in the search for decent employment; it is a necessity.

For the sake of scratching out a living, burnt-out high school students allow themselves to be shepherded along to a sentence of four more years of drudgery, senseless substance-induced anesthesia, and excessive tuition fees that the white-collar office jobs they're slaving away to get the degrees for may or may not allow them to pay off. Never are these students made aware that there is another option _ that before they resign themselves to another four years under the weight of their textbooks, they might hide away from the tyranny of education for a year or two and learn what it's like to function without a class schedule and a dormitory: What it's like to be an adult. What it's like to be a real person _ your own person; what it's like to not have homework.

High schoolers should be made aware that many colleges allow freshmen to take a year off before enrolling; it is also possible to apply to college after taking a year off. This "gap year" can be used to work or to travel, but it is primarily an opportunity for 18-year-olds to understand the true meaning of their newly-minted adult status in society. A chronic complaint about the college-age population is its indifference to anything that doesn't come in a six-pack; this former-teenage inertia is the result of treating 20-year-olds as though they were still 15. College students are given essentially the same responsibilities that they had in high school, so why should they act with any more maturity or worldliness? They've never experienced the world _ they can't identify with the struggle of the working class because they've never balanced their own checkbooks. They are infants _ they are infants being forced to learn about calculus and literary devices that they will never use outside of the classroom, but they are infants nonetheless.

No man can run on a track forever, yet every generation of high school seniors feels more pressure to sign up immediately for four more years of educational suicide runs. What many of them need is the opportunity to leave the track for a year or two and jog through the woods of adulthood, where they _ not their parents, not counselors, not the pressure of the American rat race _ decide which paths they'll take.

Jessie Matus is a senior at Oneonta High School.