5

All Teenagers Take The Same Classes, Everywhere

While pop culture would have you believe that teenagers spend all day making sex bets and hatching revenge schemes in response to sex bets, the truth is that they spend most of their time sitting in class. Literally, everyone who has ever written a script should know this and be able to get this fundamental element of teen life right, but much like the teens of today, they just can't even.

Real high schools have level systems to separate students by academic ability, if not AP or honors courses to further separate our future leaders from the future opioid addicts and pyramid scheme victims. Movies and television are always sorting characters into jock, nerd, and slacker roles -- which would absolutely have different schedules -- and then throwing them all into the same class and hoping nobody notices.

Teen shows will have the smartest kids in school taking the exact same class as the pothead four grades behind and the lineman about to get kicked off the football team for failing lunch. For instance, in Boy Meets World, Topanga winds up being the valedictorian, yet she's in class with Cory, the idiot, and Shawn, the wisecracking slacker. Even toward the end of high school, they have the exact same classes. Is this a Philadelphia school with only one classroom's worth of students?

ABC Studios"Psst! Topanga! Who is this 'Biology' girl everyone is talking about? Is she hot?"

On Saved By The Bell, Jessie is an obsessive overachiever who resorts to speed pills to study longer, Kelly is an airhead cheerleader, Screech is more like a chimpanzee than a human, and Zack is a sociopath who would break up an administrator's marriage in order to get out of class. And yet there they are, all in the same room.

Universal Television"Welcome to All the Math 1."

4

Cool Kids Love Carpooling

Hip teens are all about their spicy memes, Tide pod lunches, and sharing one vehicle between large groups of friends. Hollywood thinks that nothing screams cool like the environmentally friendly practice of carpooling, especially if you're a teenager heading to and from school. TV teens are, like, so totally concerned about their carbon footprint that they cram into cars like they're Bangladeshi buses.

Warner Bros. Television"One Tree Hill? They should have called it One Car H-"
"I will crash this car, Melissa. I will do it. I would love to do it."

3

There Is An Unlimited Amount Of Time Between High School Classes

Movies and shows think the time between classes constitutes about 70 percent of the entire school day. In a real school, you usually get five minutes to walk three minutes' worth of distance. It doesn't leave a ton of time to have profound conversations or gather together for bully ambushes. But in fictional high schools, like the one in Boy Meets World, you can style your hair, witness the beginning, middle, and end of a relationship, and give yourself a haircut. All between classes, with no one expressing any sense of urgency.

Their school gives them 90 minutes between periods. They know you always gotta look fly.

2

Teenagers Are Always Having Consequence-Free Food Fights

In a movie or TV show, all it takes to turn a room into a war zone is for one character to yell the words "FOOD FIGHT!" It's as if movie teens have been waiting their whole lives to get covered in cafeteria food -- objectively the worst kind of food. Try to think if there's ever been a time in your life when that proposition interested you, much less enthralled an entire room full of carefully styled teenagers in their favorite outfits.

20th Television"Tee-hee, look at us ruin thousands of dollars' worth of musical equipment!"

That last picture is a property-destroying riot from Glee, in an episode about several of the senior Glee Clubbers coming to terms with how they'll soon be leaving the only school where everyone expresses themselves through song and dance. They halfheartedly attempt to recruit their replacements, and somehow, moments later, it is the goddamn food Purge.

"I'm going to miss this place, you guys. Wait, I have an idea! DESTROY THE FUCKING SCHOOL!"

1

Teenagers Love To Hang Out Before Heading To School

For most of us, a school day started with a very unwelcome alarm, followed by a tough decision between personal hygiene and more sleep. Once you finally got ready and maybe ate something, you got on the bus or in the car with as close to zero seconds to spare as possible.

In movies, teenagers are always hanging out at their friends' houses, meeting up in arcades, or stopping by the home of an elderly mad scientist of no relation to play guitar. High school has an average start time of 8:00 a.m., and most people take around 11 to 30 minutes to get ready. So even assuming you live next door to your school, you're getting up at 7:48 at the latest. What kind of meth addict teenager gets up and does more than zero things before 7:48?

In a movie, that's totally normal. Bill and Ted, two slacker kids failing out of school, managed to get up early enough to get together and then write, produce, and perform a music video before school.

Orion PicturesIt's as if time travel movies don't care about linear time.

Here's a clip of Michael Cera and Jonah Hill in Superbad, both awake so early that they have time to share their masturbation fantasies while buying a slushie before school.

Jonah Hill, in particular, always seems to be up in time to run all his errands before his first class. He's just a goddamn go-getter. In 21 Jump Street, neither he nor Channing Tatum mention how fucking early it is when they go pick up a new car before their first day as undercover high-schoolers. How the hell do movie teenagers manage to fit in a whole day before 8 a.m.?

Columbia Pictures/MGM StudiosIt's as grand a mystery as 27-year-old Dave Franco being cast as a real, non-undercover high school student.

Diego Rivera is a film student from Chile. He's sometimes funny on Twitter. Jordan Breeding also writes for Paste Magazine, the Twitter, himself, and is taller than literally every teenager.

You only wish you had an alarm clock as powerful as these kids'.

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For more ways Hollywood sucks for teenagers, check out 5 Horrible Life Lessons Learned From Teen Movies and 5 Weird Things That Teen Shows Think About Actual Teens.

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