By Maria Cortes
Staff Writer
Monday morning on Halloween I lugged myself out of bed and got ready to go to class. Halloween is technically not a holiday to the school districts and if they said you had to go to class, you had to go to class. That was that. I spent the entire car ride cursing the world for making me go to class on my favorite holiday of the year.
Much to my surprise, almost everyone in my political theory class showed up. I suddenly felt less angry. At least I wasn’t the only one miserable that they had to be there. It got me thinking: how many people actually showed up to class on Halloween?
Two weeks before Halloween my entire world literature class practically mutinied against our teacher until we were promised the holiday off. Chances are that we wouldn’t have shown up to class even if he had not had the day off. Halloween may not be a district recognized holiday, but it’s a student recognized one.
I took a survey of 110 Antelope Valley College students to see who went to school, who didn’t, and if not, why? I was preparing myself for a slew of costume party stories, drunken antics and a possible arrest or two, but my results shocked me. Out of the 110 students surveyed, only seven of them said that they did not attend class that Monday. The reason was plain and simple: “It was Halloween.”
103 of the 110 attended class. Most of them had class-related reasons such as assignments due, tests and quizzes that could not be missed and some were there just to be there. They came to school because they wanted to. Some of the students, 19 to be exact, even showed up in costume and participated in the on-campus costume contest. Their costumes consisted of porcelain dolls, pirates, “Nightmare on Elm Street” villain Freddy Krueger, an apocalypse survivor and many more. Some were even participates in the AVC Haunted House.
The majority of the students who had gone to class said that they acknowledged Halloween and would be celebrating later on in the day, but school came first. It makes me wonder about how much we have all actually grown up. We may come to school in our Halloween costumes (that part of our childhood hasn’t faded away), but the point is that we came to school in the first place.
Our priorities are in a different place and now some things are more important than others. I guess this is a good thing. We’ve managed to find a perfect balance between the responsibilities of adulthood and still wanting to run around dressed up as Velma Dinkley for a day. Yes, I was Velma Dinkley.
