In high school, my two best friends, Evie and Sarah, and I struggled a lot with teachers’ expectations of us. We enjoyed our classes and participated in the discussions, but a lot of the teachers enjoyed calling on people at random and asking them to hold conversations in other languages, explain some chemical concept or recite the causes of the second World War. Most of the time, the person chosen had no idea what the answer was. One day, my friend Sarah was really sick and lost her voice, but one of our teachers called on her to hold a full-on conversation anyway.

I will never forget the response that came out of Sarah’s mouth.

“Why do you always feel the need to embarrass me?”

Our teacher, who had a penchant for singleing the wrong people out, promptly apologized, but with that small interaction, a revolution was born. Now, at this point in our final year of high school, we had already been exposed to the wondrous musical/book, "Les Miserables." We identified so profoundly with the lyrics that fought for a better world and justice for all. Of course, we weren’t fighting for freedom from a repression regime, except, we sort of were. Our teachers would expect too much from us. Hours of homework, tests and quizzes every week on material we barely understood, and a general atmosphere in the classes that showed us that it didn’t matter if we were sick, unhappy or struggling to keep up, we were still expected to do what we were told without question or resistance.

Luckily, some of our high school teachers created environments in which it was okay to let out our frustrations. It started off with small acts of rebellion. We began equating our exams with song lyrics such as, “Red: the blood of angry men! Black: the dark of ages past!” We even went so far as to change them to, “Red: the color of the pen! Black: the color of my soul!” It sounds bizarre and overdramatic, but it was the show that united us all. It was hard for us to go through each day without acknowledging how little some of our teachers seemed to care about our sanity.

They expected us to stretch ourselves so thin that we barely had time to do anything but eat, sleep and breathe our academics. Evie made jokes about starting barricades on a daily basis. "Les Miserables" simply provided an outlet through which we could channel our anger and stress over the tumultuous senior year we were having. Evie, Sarah and I were never rebellious enough to outwardly defy authority, but we definitely questioned it. Instead of blindly accepting directions, we began asking what the purpose of it all was. We just wanted to know the rhyme and reason behind our teachers’ expectations. We never wanted to bully them. We just wanted to search for a purpose to justify the craziness we were enduring.

Exam week was particularly interesting. We counted down days, hours and minutes until we were finally done with our foreign language class. Our professor was well aware of our disgruntled behavior and did not allow it to affect the classes to an unreasonable extent. It was the last final standing between us and summer. We walked in, took our normal seats, and Sarah began humming the tune of “Do You Hear the People Sing.” It was stuck in my head the entire exam period. As we turned in our finals and walked out the door, we immediately burst into song. We shouted the lyrics from the upstairs classrooms all the way to the parking lot. Everyone must have thought we were crazy (we probably were), but it is one of the best feelings and memories I have from high school.

Now, you’re probably wondering, “What is the point of this story?” The point is that each and everyone one of us has a battle to fight. Some might be more serious than others, but they are battles nonetheless. Evie, Sarah and I gained so many valuable lessons from our experiences leading the barricade. We learned how to respectfully question authority, how to recognize injustice, even if seems petty, and most importantly, how the time we share with other people can be carried on, even to totally new environments like college.

I thought the rebellion would end with that last final, which we all passed, but I recognize now that it is never going to end. We will always have someone trying to pick on us, force us into something we don’t want to do, expect too much or silence us into obedience. Sarah stood up for herself, and we all finally realized how willing we were to just accept whatever was given to us. We deserve better. I continue to gain so much from my time at the senior year barricades. I never want to feel myself settling for anything.

So, the next time you feel yourself being singled out, want to find your voice or simply want to be inspired, I recommend you watch "Les Miserables." You’ll find that we all have something to fight for, and the barricade boys can be our guides.

Vive la révolution. Long live the revolution.