6 Things Hollywood Always Gets Wrong About Being A Teenager

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."

Daria is in the same class as the cheerleaders and football players, who are portrayed as being so stupid that she can barely manage to feel contempt for them. Which must suck for her, because she's learning the same things at the same rate they are.

Paramount Television"Class, please open your All the Math books to Chapter 4: Beginner and Advanced Math."

Mean Girls also apparently takes place in a school with only one math class. Cady is "really good" at math, while Aaron is "kinda bad" at it, and yet they are in the exact same class, junior year. Should a mathlete like Lindsay Lohan really be sitting behind the handsome boy who has to count on his fingers? What's she going to get out of that situation, other than HPV?

Paramount Pictures"Teacher, the answer is 1 over cute butt to the dreamy eyes!"

In The Duff, Bianca is great at science, while Wesley is a jock with grades so bad that he is academically ineligible to play football and might lose his scholarship to Ohio State University, home of this tweet. By the end of the movie, he can't get a grade above a B+, even with Bianca tutoring him every day. How could they possibly be in the same class? She should be in AP physics with all the other nerds, and he should be collecting bugs and guessing the names of rocks. The point is, this isn't a frontier classroom by a pig farm-- teachers don't throw all the kids into one room and read to all of them from the same Bible anymore.

This strange phenomenon happens in pretty much all teen-centered media across the decades, from Fast Times At Ridgemont High to 13 Reasons Why. Which is odd, since real teenagers think carpooling is about as cool as unregulated gun ownership.

Universal PicturesThe only way these guys managed to visit three locations and smoke a pound of weed before school would be if they were trying to make it to school two days ago.

In Riverdale, they have time to trade long monologues and accuse each other of elaborate murder plans while still presumably making it to their next class.

"Can some of this intrigue wait until after school? I only have 40 more minutes to make it to Beginner/Advanced All Math. You know this, because you have it too. So do all of you. Hey, why did we even switch rooms?"

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!"

In Vice Principals, two rival educators are trying to kill each other, and their angry presence sparks a massive food fight. So it seems that any chaos, whether it is life and death or plain silly fun, will ignite the volatile powder keg that is teen lunching.

We see these inexplicable, random fights break out over and over in films like Matilda, Max Keeble's Big Move, Whip It!, Valley Girl, and Animal House. They also happen in shows like Lizzie Macguire, Boy Meets World, The Suite Life Of Zack And Cody, and even Power Rangers. Just because you defend the world from Lord Zedd does not mean you're above trying to destroy a bunch of children with handfuls of chili.

Saban BrandsWhile they threw cake, 40,000 people died in a TurbanShell attack.

Picture the aftermath of a real school food fight. You'd have to spend at least a couple of hours covered in caked-on rotting food, all mixed together to form the exact recipe for vomit. You have to go home and explain to your parents why your best pants are ruined, your phone is filled with mashed potatoes, and your books have been soaking in melted Jello. The cafeteria is a legitimate biohazard that no school budget is prepared to deal with. Now try to picture the trouble you'd be in. Well, in a movie, nobody gives a shit.

You can create a tornado of garbage, and there won't be a single consequence. Five episodes of Glee should have been them singing sad songs in detention after they destroyed an entire cafeteria. There should have been a scene in which they begged their principal not to press criminal charges with a Salt n' Pepa song. You can't simply decide to start a landfill where you stand because someone screams "food fight." It absolutely does not go well when it happens in real life, as we see time and time and time and time again.

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'.

Support Cracked's journalism with a visit to our Contribution Page. Please and thank you.

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.

All the cool kids are following us on Facebook.