Until I went away to college I never really understood just how small my high school really was, I mean, I know I live in a small town but having 300 students in my entire high school isn’t that different…right? It wasn’t that different until I realized that for many people, 300 students is the equivalent to just half of their graduating class. Bigger schools might have a football team, and pep rallies straight out of a movie but unlike hair in Texas and the size of your pancakes at breakfast, bigger is not always better.

1.You not only knew everyone in the entire school by name, but you personally knew them as well.

2. So naturally you also knew everyone’s family.

3. You knew every teacher by their first name and you still run into them in town and always say "hi" even though you graduated three years ago.

4. Which means you probably played town soccer with their kids.

5. Chances are you had a pretty good idea where about everyone lived (or still lives, it’s not creepy I swear, the town is just one road).

6. Everyone looks at you with disdain and shock when you tell them how many people you graduated with (for me 63, yikes).

7. You started kindergarten with basically everyone in your entire graduating class.

8. New kids weren’t really “new” because you figured out their entire life story by the end of the week (usually by the end of the day).

9. By senior year, you have had a class in every room throughout the school at least once.

10. For such a small school you had the most school pride.

11. Even if your football team wasn’t the best, due to the minuscule amount of people going out for the team (or if you’re like me your school was too small for a football team).

12. There were too many parking spots and not enough students.

13. By lunch, it was almost guaranteed every rumor for that day had circulated the school, at least, three times (even the middle school kids caught wind of it)

14. Did I mention school was grades 7-12?

15. Even with the middle school kids, the student population was still less than 500.

16. Every friend group had a specific table they sat at during lunch all four years (and forget lunch waves, everybody ate lunch together).

17. Your graduation took less than two hours.

18. You had so many tickets to graduation you began running out of people to invite so you considered bringing your dog.

19. Every morning you woke up cursing about how much you hated the school and began counting down graduation day starting sophomore year (now that I think of it maybe this is just me).

20. But you cannot imagine going to school anywhere else because at the end of the day we were one big family and you had 63+ people you could count on to have your back (give or take a few).