Want to be able to do some beating down on your own? You’ll need a little martial arts training.

Pick up some cheap mma gloves and start your martial arts training.

There are many traditional martial arts schools and MMA gyms. You don’t have to be Cris Cyborg to be able to stand up to a high school bully. A few months of training and you’ll be so far beyond the bully that has no training that even if they’re bigger you’ll be fine.

Be sure the martial arts or MMA school does real-world training where you battle your school-mates at full speed. If your just drilling forms, when things go down, you may panic.

Good luck!

You want to be one of the boys their dating. Pick up a seventeen magazine subscription which may be a little less embaressing than picking up the latest issue at the newsstand every month.  You can also go to seventeen.com although it’s not as focussed as the magazine.

Read what the celebrities says about dating. The celebrities in those magazines are emulated. Try to understand what the girls are seeking and importantly what they’re not interested in. It will teach you not to sweat most of what you worry about. The girls will often discuss their comfort level with their boyfriend, or lack of compatability or trust with their ex. Be honest, understanding and unassuming and let the girl be herself.

A girlfriend is a huge help for surviving highschool.

5) Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
This one talks about a kid in high school named Ferris who ditches a day from school and hangs out with his girlfriend and best friend. They go to the museum, a baseball game, and even start a campaign to raise money for Ferris. This is an instant classic without a doubt.

4) The Breakfast Club
Five high school students from completely different social groups sit around in detention one day and learn a heck of a lot about each other. It talks about why they landed in detention and whether or not they can truly be friends. A must see.

3) Superbad
This one is a little more recent but it is still extremely good. It deals with more recent high school and all boils down to one big party that night where this guy is trying to get with this girl. It’s pretty good because it is somewhat like real high school today, whereas the movies that are 10+ years old are a bit out of date.

2) Fast Times at Ridgemont High
This movie is about high school in the 80s. It’s a pretty accurate representation of what things were like, and it’s also really, really funny. A good storyline and some sex make this movie my #2.

1) Dazed and Confused
It’s the last day of school in 1975. I really don’t know what to say about this movie except ‘I wish this is what high school was really like’. Check this movie out and tell me whether or not this is the greatest high school movie ever. You can’t deny it. This movie is great.

Play “School’s Out” by Alice Cooper
This is mandatory for the first day of summer vacation. This needs to be blasting for the entire day to get yourself in the ‘I don’t have to do anything’ mood.

Get Other Good Summer Tunes
Make a nice CD with the following songs - Summer of ‘69 by Bryan Adams, Summer in the City by The Lovin’ Spoonful, California Girls by The Beach Boys, and Hot Fun in the Summertime by Sly and the Family Stone.

Find Some Girls (or guys)
Depending on your gender/sexual orientation, it is highly recommended that you find a few people that you like to hang out with. Make good friends with them and maybe even a little bit more. It always makes the summer that much better.

Go Outside
I swear to God, if you spend the 3 best months of the year in the house playing XBox 360, you are going to hate yourself during the winter. Sure, 1 or 2 nights of week of video games is fine, but if you are spending all day and night playing it, you need help.

Play Sports
Not only do they help keep you in shape, it’s really fun too. Play baseball at the park or basketball outside. Something to keep you energized during the day and get some color. If you haven’t tried it, you will learn to like it.

Drink
Nothing beats drinking outside in the summer. Hang at a friends backyard and sleepover there, or even have people over at your house. I’m not talking about Kool Aid either. And although I’m saying this is fun, technically I can’t recommend to you an illegal activity (underage drinking). But…it’s fun (hint hint).

How many summers of freedom do you have left? Don’t waste them sleeping til 4pm and playing video games til 5am.

Getting a detention is not the end of the world. If people look at you like one of those perfect students, you are not going to have many friends. In fact, you’ll probably get made fun of for being a dork. It is fine if you put effort into your classes and everything, but you really need to mess around once in awhile.

Start a food fight. Mess with the freshman. Raise your hand and say something stupid in class (limit this to once per month). Take a dump in the urinal. No. I’m just kidding. Don’t do that. Book check a friend (or an enemy). Just find something to do that you know won’t result in a big punishment, but it will be fun to do. In fact, you’ll probably get away with it if you are smart. No one really tells on each other in high school.

Screwing around a bit makes high school more fun, and people will like you more. Don’t be the class clown, but be a fun person to be around. No one wants to be friends with the kid that studies 24/7. So don’t be that kid.

Of course, if you don’t like any sports at all, then this isn’t advice for you. But even if you have a slight interest in one, try and make the team. It’s fun to be on it, whether or not you play, and you make a lot of friends. The training is tough but rewarding, and the respect you get for being on the team around school is great.

If you feel lacking before trying out, you can buy a door gym or some other simple home fitness equipment and begin an exercise regimen. After a week or two, you’ll feel your body begin to change and your confidence in your body and your ability to improve yourself increase.

Also, you won’t have to really work if you’re on a sports team. Most parents won’t deny you the ability to play on the team, and if you’re busy with practice every day, you don’t have to work! Trust me, unless you find a job you really like, you don’t want to work in high school. You’ve got the rest of your life to work. Spend high school having fun. And by joining a sports team, that’s pretty much a guarantee. No matter how hard it is, the reward is like none other.

Is high school drinking a problem?
If you believe that since most students go through high school and do drink at one point or another, then the answer to your question is yes. However, you need to look deeper into the question. To do this, I’m going to talk about my second question.

Does drinking in high school pose a risk to the students?
The only time that drinking in high school would pose a risk to students is if a) they were drinking on school nights, or skipping school to drink or b) they were uninformed about alcohol, and were drinking too much. The first problem is difficult to avoid if the student gets in a bad habit of doing this, but they could avoid that problem by being educated about drinking, perhaps in courses at school or even by parents. The third risk it could pose is if the student is driving drunk, which is just a really, really bad idea. In this case, the student needs to be severally disciplined, such as a loss of license.

What is the solution?
21 is the oldest worldwide age to drink alcohol. The majority of countries require you to be 18 to drink, and you never hear about those people having problems. Therefore, I propose that the drinking age be lowered to 19. Why not 18? Well, 18 year olds in high school would mean that they can buy alcohol for 14 year old freshmen. Therefore, the age needs to be 19 so that college drinking would actually be legal, and it would be avoided in high school. In all honesty, if you are in high school, you probably wish that you could legally drink. But even if it were legal, you know that’d you still probably have the same problems as if it weren’t legal. Getting alcohol is easy, but what about finding a place to drink? If you were 15 and could legally drink, do you still think that your parents would let you? In their home?

It’s fun, and doing it in high school isn’t really bad if you know how to control it, but save your drinking years for college, because those will be really fun.

A lot of the material learned in high school is never used again in your life. For the kid who wants to be an engineer, English isn’t his biggest interest. In fact, he’ll probably never need to know how to speak perfectly. Also, the kid who wants to do something with math as a career could care less about Biology.

So is cheating wrong? To be honest, I really don’t think that copying homework from time to time is wrong. If you are passing answers around on a test, that’s a different story. However, like I’ve said before, high school is a game. Those who succeed the most in high school aren’t the ones who leave with the most knowledge.

Of course, there are certain cases when cheating is unacceptable. In college, when you are trying to finish your degree, you should probably not cheat. In fact, cheating in college usually just comes back to screw you in the end.

But for now, in high school, the occasional copying of someone’s homework isn’t such a terrible thing. You’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do to succeed, right?

1) Don’t Piss Off Teachers
This one is really a no-brainer, but you’ll notice that the more you piss a teacher off, the less likely of a chance you have of getting an A. Supposedly teachers aren’t supposed to play favorites, but you know what? They are human beings too. Just because they are teachers doesn’t mean that they won’t manipulate numbers to make sure you don’t do well. I’m not saying suck up to them, I’m just suggesting that you don’t get on their bad side. They’ll be a lot nicer come grade time.

2) Act Interested
No one in their right mind is actually interested in chemistry, but if you appear to be interested in the subject material at hand, teachers will definitely give you the benefit of the doubt come grading time. The kid that doesn’t really care and never participates in class isn’t going to catch any breaks, but the one always asking questions and answering others will be given a good grade. Even if you don’t do that great on tests, teachers will definitely be lenient on free-response/essay questions. Just act interested, and you’ll be closer to an A.

3) No Late Work
This goes along with 1 and 2, but was significant enough to warrant a category of its own. Teachers tend to give ‘busywork’ to students just so that a) they have some grades to put in the grade book and b) students have an opportunity to boost their grade. Those 5 questions the teacher assigned to you were meant for you to bring your grade up. In fact, teachers don’t usually bother reading the assignments extremely carefully. If they see you have done the work, they most likely will give a 100%. Forget to do these small assignments and they eventually add up and screw you over.

4) Learn, Then Forget
The stuff you learn about the War of 1812 probably isn’t going to be very useful in life. That’s why you need to learn how to ‘learn, then forget’. By knowing something for just a few days, you’ll actually be able to do pretty well on the tests. Tests usually make up a large percentage of your grade, so just try and learn the important stuff and don’t study forever. Shoot for a B on every test, which should be easy if you just take a little bit of time to learn the material. You might not remember it in a week, but you’ll definitely know it for a few days.

5) Talk to Teachers After Class
This is one of the absolute best tips I can give - talk to teachers after class. It goes along with the whole ‘act interested’ bit. If you ask teachers a few questions after class, they’ll know you are putting in an effort. And which do you think a teacher likes to see more? A student that knows everything but doesn’t put any effort into school, or one that might not be the smartest but is one of the hardest working. Grades are based largely on effort, not just knowledge.

So there you’ve got my 5 steps to ‘playing the high school game’. Remember them, and try to implement them in a class or two. You’ll be surprised at the end result.