2 
What’s Wrong with All-Boys Schools, Pt. 1
2 St. Christopher makes getting to know girls almost impossible. Well, maybe not St. Christopher himself, whoever he was. But St. Christopher’s, the school where I’ve been going for eight endless years. St. Christopher’s School for Boys in Brooklyn Heights, New York City.
Honestly, what is the point of a boys-only school in the twenty-first century? Maybe it made sense in 1913, when this place was founded. When half the boys at St. Chris’s wanted to become monks or priests—two jobs that make you swear off girls for life—when they grew up. But now, a hundred years later, I can promise you that none of the guys I know has ever once thought about giving up girls for good just so he can serve God. And what’s so holy and spiritual about completely ignoring half the people on Earth, anyway?
Some people say that single-sex schools help kids concentrate better, but that’s crazy. I would never want to look like an idiot in front of a whole bunch of cute girls, so I would study even harder if St. Chris’s were coed. I’d memorize my entire Latin textbook (and this is a completely different subject, but where else do you have to learn Latin, except inside the walls of an all-boys school?) if it meant I had a chance to impress a room half filled with members of the fairer sex.
I’d be way less depressed, too. Have you ever looked at the seventh- and eighth-grade classes in a boys school and seen how bummed out everyone looks? More than half my class has been at St. Chris’s since kindergarten. That includes me; my best friend, John Nomura; my other friend, Ira Lopez; Richard Krug; Greg Vargas; Rocky Van Sant; Trevor Zelo; and a few others, and let me tell you: we are so completely sick of one another that we are miserably depressed. And who wouldn’t be? Imagine looking at the same boring faces, day after day, for eight whole years. With the exception of Nomura and Ira, if I never saw a single one of my classmates’ ugly mugs again, I would die happy! And if they all, with the exception of Ira and Nomura, said the same thing about me, I wouldn’t blame them.
But I’m stuck with these guys, they’re stuck with me, and we’re not even through seventh grade yet.
Now, if half my class were girls, things would be completely different. Sure, we’d still be sick of one another after eight whole years, but starting in sixth grade, certain miraculous biological, um, changes would become noticeable in many of us, and these changes, these transformations, would make all the difference. We’d see one another with new eyes. Friendships would change and grow, romances would blossom, and like I mentioned before, we’d all be studying really hard.
So, having girls at St. Chris’s would make us all smarter and way better prepared for high school. I guarantee it.