Sydney+K.

If high school is all about learning who you are, why limit what you can try?  I do not have enough fingers and toes to count the number of times my friends or I have done something and said “Well I didn’t know when in life I would ever get the chance and high school seemed like a pretty good time to try”. Now most of you reading that sentence are probably ready to write the rest of this paper off as just another excuse as to why kids do stupid things in high school, well don’t, because I’m not here to justify anything kids do illegally in high school. What this article is really all about is hair and its role in high school. I attended a public high school for 2 ½ years and I’ve learned that one of the most overlooked experimental things kids try in high school is messing with their hair. Generally before uttering the broad disclaimer as to why one of my friends tried something, they showed up to school with an entirely new look on their head. High school students have tried everything on their head, from the girl who shaved her head to her boyfriend who grew his hair 20 inches to the guy who bleached words into his hair to the girl who never showed up to school with the same color twice to the girl who spent a hour putting spikes in it every morning, and these are just some of the people I know. Hair is just a safe way to express something about yourself and a way to change who you are without having to follow any sort of limitations. So why is it that if high school students have found a safe outlet to express themselves, that people of authority are trying to put that freedom down? From what I understand the answer to that question is that authority finds this expression as distracting as the students find it liberating. When I went to private school for eight years they told us how the rules on limiting hair styles were there to keep us from distracting other students and I believed it too. However its not like that at public school, I don’t even know if they have such a thing as too distracting, though I’m sure they could leave it up to high school students to find something. The point is that once I was surrounded on all sides by colored, sculpted, and just plain wacky hair, I wasn’t distracted at all. I don’t feel as though it prohibited my learning because of what some girl woke up extra early to do to her hair. In fact I was fascinated by the concept that schools would ever want to deny kids the right to freely mess with their hair because it seems like such a safe way to experiment with different sides of yourself and to get attention for something other than what high schoolers are notorious for doing to get attention. Some shy kid who would otherwise go unnoticed in high school only had to add a streak of color to their hair or curl it for the day and suddenly people noticed them and praised them for trying something new and I don’t believe there is any student who wouldn’t enjoy extra attention for the day. So even though understand where administrators are coming from when they limit what students can wear to school and do to their hair, I think they are missing the point as to what it means to a kid to have options and learn through trying different thing. Actually what I believe most is that teachers should encourage this period of our lives when we are most open to trying things through providing more activities in class that promote individuality.