School makes teenagers annoying

Walking past the local high school on the way to the subway, I was getting rather frustrated at the clumps of kids who would block the whole entire sidewalk, as though it never occurred to them that other people might be in a hurry and trying to get by.

Then I realized, it's quite possible it's never occurred to them that other people are in a hurry and trying to get by. I'm not saying that they're too stupid to understand this or anything, but when I think about it from the point of view of a high school student, it's quite possible they've never in their lives walked past the school. They walk to the school. You only walk past the school if you're going from one of maybe a dozen buildings straight to Yonge. If they don't live in these dozen buildings (most of which tend towards one-bedroom apartments), this sidewalk has been a thoroughfare for them. To them it's just the area in front of their school.

And it may have never occurred to them that other people are in a hurry because they aren't in a hurry themselves. In a school, classes always start at the same time and everyone is in a hurry at the same time. You don't have some people starting at 8:30 and some people starting at 9. So they may well have never been in an environment where they're in a hurry but other people aren't.

So I'm thinking maybe a lot of the seemingly inconsiderate behaviour of large groups of teenagers is really the result of the fact that they've spent the vast majority of their lives in the institutional environment of school. In school, you're never alone trying to do something different from the people around you. You're always in groups, you're always doing the same thing as the other people around you, you're always on the same schedule as the people around you. So it doesn't occur to the clumps of kids blocking the sidewalk that I might be in a hurry to get past because they've never been in a hurry to get passed. It doesn't occur to the throngs in the foodcourt that I might have to grab my lunch in a hurry and get back to the office because they've never had to finish their lunch and get back before the rest of the throng. It doesn't occur to the cluster blocking the entire grocery store aisle deciding what kind of pop to get that I might want to get past and grab something real quick because they've never done a quick grocery run knowing precisely what they need.

Unfortunately I don't have any solutions, other than saying "Excuse me please." (And they do always apologize and move.)