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Before I started high school, I envisioned a place with full-length lockers lining the halls, a large cafeteria where the stereotypical cliques were separated by tables, and decorated posters hung throughout the campus demonstrating school spirit or advertising a club event. Once I began, that picture was destroyed by the reality of high school.

The expectations I had built up were based on TV shows that depict high school as something it is not. Some popular shows that many teenagers watch include 90210, Gossip Girl, and Glee. These all have characters who are high school students living the high school life. I’m sure most real students agree that high school life is not like what is shown in these series.

In Glee, cheerleaders wear their cheerleading uniforms every day, everywhere. They are portrayed as the mean yet popular girls who “rule the school,” along with the football players who always seem to bully the other students in the show. The FOX series makes it seem as though the students in the Glee club are nerdy or at the bottom of the high school hierarchy. One show has the football players throw one of the Glee members in the dumpster, which I’ve never actually heard of happening in real life.

In Gossip Girl, the girls seem to believe in a high school hierarchical system with queens who are followed by the girls classified beneath them. This is as far from the truth as it gets.

Not only do the shows portray the campus and students as different from what they really are, but they don’t include any of the stress and studying that comes with school. The characters end the school day and seem to do everything but homework.

TV is all about entertaining it’s viewers by showing them what they want to see which is not the real life. Many people don’t realize this but TV is fantasy. When students compare what they watch on TV to reality, they are often disappointed, which is a problem in our society.

As TV continues to portray high school as something different than it really is, pre-teens and teenagers will have to learn for themselves what the reality of high school is, rather than basing it on what they watch on TV.