Social Life

Students have time to socialize explicitly during first break and lunchtime. Most students will spend these times in the cafeteria, in the gym, or on the soccer pitch. Students are able to socialize within their groups in class or with their neighbors in class, because the school curriculum is project-based, and teachers assume students must talk in order to ask questions and work together for projects.

Fitting-in in middle school.
In RAS, equality is promoted. RAS teachers tell us that we should accept one another even if there are differences we don’t like. Students often see a need to fit in. As RAS is a really small school, this isn’t as obvious unless you are a part of a certain class. In any school, there are always separation between students. The cool kids, the smart ones, the ones with special talents and the ones who are athletic. In this school, you will realise that most kids with fit into at least two of these categories. Some students fit into only one and there are some who don’t fit into any of these categories, but that will not be touched in this article.

When it comes to fitting, you would think that the most pressure starts in high school, but this isn’t true at all. The need to fit in is most in middle school. This is mainly because middle school classes are bigger than the entire high school, so there is a bigger variety of people. There are other reasons for this as well, like age and maturity, but it's mostly the class sizes. The weirdest thing is that the middle schoolers never force you to fit, you will just find a need to fit in. For instance, there was once a thing about all boys playing soccer in middle school. There were a few boys however, who didn’t like or know how to play soccer. The “soccer boys” as we call them never forced these other boys to play soccer. What they actually did was leave these boys out on everything. Lunch, break, advisory, you name it. When the extra curricular activities began, it was surprising to see these boys join soccer. None of them did well and often times got hurt, but they still went ahead and continued playing.

Fitting-in in high school
Yes, it is true that there is more pressure to fit in in middle school, but that however, doesn't mean that there is no pressure in high school at all. Luke, a high schooler, said "Fitting in is hard because you have to adapt your personality to fit the people around you."