 Hi guys, it's Alex. Welcome back to my channel. If you guys are new here, make sure to give this video a thumbs up and subscribe. I haven't filmed a main channel style video in forever, so let me know down below if you miss these kinds of videos. I love vlogging, but I also love doing these videos. Today I'm going to be talking to you guys about what it was like or the truth about to going to a performing arts high school. I went to the Osceola County School for the Arts. I graduated in 2014 and that is pretty much my history. I started there in seventh grade and I went there through twelfth grade. I did dance the entire time I was there. And I just had a really good high school experience and I don't have really anything to complain about during my time there. So I'm just going to kind of give you the rundown of everything and what it was like. If you guys are interested in hearing what it was like going to an art school, keep on watching. So I have all of the points I kind of want to cover on my phone. So if you guys see me looking down, I'm just going to be reading off of my phone. I just have like bullet points right here. So the first thing I kind of wanted to talk about is the arts that you could choose from. So we had a ton of different performing arts categories that you could choose from. So first we had visual arts, then we have dance, we have drama, we had vocal. There's creative writing, technical theater, orchestra and band. Our school also covered the grades six through twelve. If you were in middle school, you could only do band or dance. I don't know if that's still the case. Middle school includes six through eighth grade. If you wanted to transition or change your major, you could go to any of the other majors offered in high school. OK, so that's a kind of a brief overview of kind of the school and what they had to offer. Now I'm just going to get into kind of the details of what it was like going to AXA. We just shortened it and called it AXA instead of Osceola County School for the Arts. This school is actually still open and everything. So if you want to like check it out, it's definitely changed from when I was there. But I'm just going to tell you the experiences and everything what it was like when I was there personally. I also wanted to add that this was a public school, so I didn't have to pay for anything. It was actually a magnet school, so you had to audition, but I just wanted to include that. So this might change now if you watch this video, but this is from when I was there. So the first thing is music. So during classes, you could have your iPod. That was a big push for the iPod touch. I really wanted one and I saved up, sold my bike so I could get an iPod touch. And the main reason why it was because during classes, if you were like reading or taking notes, doing just book work or whatever in your classes, you could listen to music or play games if you're waiting or something. When the iPhone came around, it was awesome too because you could listen and text your friends. You weren't really supposed to text, but everyone did it. So that was another really cool thing. Some teachers were like really strict and said, oh, you can't listen to music. But other teachers were like really loose about it. And you could honestly listen to music when they were talking. It fluctuated differently with different teachers, obviously. And at lunchtime, you could always like have your iPod out or your phone. And it was just a really cool thing that not a lot of schools around here allow. Music was definitely a big part of AXA. And I was actually kind of cool at dance or whatever because I always had new music because you're always constantly learning and hearing new songs because of school, which was pretty cool. So lunch was an hour long and it was so cool because you can practice during lunch, like your art or whatever you had to do. You could sit out in the courtyard. You could go literally wherever you wanted for lunch. We did have a cafeteria area, but it was kind of smaller and not. I mean, I don't really know who actually ate lunch in there, but I never ate lunch in there. I always ate out in the courtyard with some of my friends. You could dance during lunch. You could go in the hallway and have practices. It was just really cool and you had a long time at lunch. It was just really like flexible. I guess there was a lot of freedom at this school. And yeah, just eating anywhere you wanted, that was awesome. Obviously, there were some parts of the school that were like blocked off, like you couldn't eat lunch there. Like in the hallway, you couldn't eat lunch in the hallway, but you could practice in the hallway. That's the main reason why you couldn't eat lunch in there. So most high schools and middle schools, you change classes. And to change the class, you get alerted by a bell. So it might sound just like a normal bell. It might be like two dings and whatever. But when I was at Auxa, what would be our bell was music. So there would be just different songs, maybe popular songs, maybe old songs. It didn't really matter, but it would be like five minutes of just music, which was so cool. I feel like they got rid of that towards the end of my time at Auxa, which was really sad, but all throughout like middle school and most of high school, our bells were music. So our schedule at the high school and middle school, it was really interesting because it was blocked scheduling, which means Monday, Wednesday, Friday, you had a set schedule. And then Tuesday and Thursday would be a different schedule. Now, it's going to be kind of hard to explain on camera. But if you guys have block scheduling at your school, you kind of know the rhythm of it. Monday, Wednesday and Friday for one week, it would be purple day. And then Tuesday and Thursday would be teal day. On a Monday, you would have like language, art, science, I don't know, social studies and then your art class. So dance would be one day. And then your second day would be a whole set, other set of classes. But third period, which is either like gym for some people, social studies, geography, which is kind of the same thing, psychology or whatever. Your third period, you always had every day because that was a shorter period. So you would alternate purple, teal day, purple, teal day, purple, teal day. Week one would be like purple, teal, purple, teal. So then the next week would be teal, purple, teal, purple. So when someone would say, oh, we're on a teal week, that means Monday was teal day. So Monday, Wednesday, Friday was teal day. If you're on a purple week, it would be Monday, Wednesday, Friday is purple. So it kind of like is just always purple, teal, purple, teal, purple, teal, purple, teal. And then each day you only had four periods. So you would have your first two periods, then lunch in the middle. And then third period was short because you had that every day. And then you had fourth period. That's kind of how the scheduling was. And I actually really liked that. Some people don't like that. They want to have all seven classes or whatever at the same day. But if you don't have an assignment, it kind of gives you more time because of the block scheduling to get it done. So I honestly loved having block scheduling. This was probably my favorite thing. And they got rid of it probably before I even started high school. But you could go into the library and get hot chocolate and coffee during lunch in the library for a dollar. Which is kind of expensive or whatever, but like to drink hot chocolate or coffee when you're in the library doing something during lunchtime. That was like pretty cool to like a middle schooler. So I'd always do that. And then like this lady would always yell at me about like just drinking my hot chocolate, not doing anything else, which, you know, like I was a kid. Come on, what do you expect from me? I got rid of that because probably like too many spills or like they just didn't want to anymore. But that's something that I distinctly remember and I loved it so much because I felt like so adultish and everything. I already mentioned this, but freedom was like such a big thing at this school. Towards the end of it, a lot of the freedoms were kind of like being stripped away, which I don't know if it's like that. Again, I don't know because like I graduated in 2014. I remember a lot of the freedoms were kind of starting to be taken away. Another really cool thing is each grade was represented by a rainbow color. So sixth grade was red and 12th grade was purple. And it was interesting too, because purple was like our school color. And hence why we have purple days and teal days. Purple and teal were our school's colors. When you were purple, like you were senior, you like kind of ruled the school. Everyone kind of knew who you are or who you were. I think it just played out like really cool that everything led up to purple and purple was one of our school colors. Sixth grade was red, seventh grade was orange, eighth grade was yellow, ninth grade was green. I love how I remember this. 10th grade was light blue, 11th grade was dark blue. And then senior year was purple. I didn't really understand why I mean, I kind of understand why. But sophomore year and junior year, I mean, you're still blue. So I just consider like sophomore and junior year than nothing years because like nothing's really exciting. Like ninth grade, you're like in high school and it's kind of a different experience. Senior year is like going to get out of here. You kind of rule school. It was just kind of fun to have your color represent your grade. And you would have an ID and the border of the ID would be the color and that represented your grade. So I will flash on the screen all of my IDs. I did not attend AXA in sixth grade, so I do not have a sixth grade ID. But here is all of my IDs and I will get into why the colors actually mean something more than just representing your grade. So why are the colors important? Well, I mean, it's not very, very significant, but it's kind of a school tradition. Again, I don't know if they do this still. I know they do because I've seen pictures. We have this thing called color wars, which basically I feel like color wars happens towards the end of the year. Kind of like, oh, you're done with this grade, but I'm going to represent my class. So class of 2014, when we were seniors, obviously we're purple. All of the grades, middle school through high school, all compete to win color wars. I don't know what the prize was. I don't think we ever won one. Maybe we did senior year. I don't ever really remember winning anything, and I don't know what the prize was either. Teachers were the judges. We would come together as a class and perform at lunch. Everyone was kind of against each other because obviously the sophomores don't want the sixth graders to win. So we would all come together as a class and try to beat out the other grades, if that makes sense. I guess I'll have some video overlay of some of the color wars. I actually have a color wars video on my channel from senior year. So I'll probably put some overlays of that as well. But color wars was just so much fun and having class t-shirts and stuff. Yeah. Oh, that's another thing I forgot. On color war day, your whole class would wear your color. So I know junior and senior year, our class got t-shirts. So you would give the money to the class treasurer or something, and then you would get a t-shirt. But other than that, if we were in eighth grade, we would just wear yellow. So try to find something yellow in your closet or whatever and wear it so you can rep your eighth grade class. So that was really fun. I remember also two in eighth grade, the caution tape was really popular. I also forgot to mention we decorated the whole school in our color. So sixth grade would have like try to outdo, you know, the 11th graders and the seventh graders would try to outdo the sixth graders. Like we would all try to outdo each other and like cover the whole school, like with banners and everything with like our color, like green. So like the whole school was like a rainbow kind of. I remember towards the end of my time at AUXA, we had zones. So like one hallway would be ninth graders, like ninth graders decorations. And then like 11th graders would have their own hallway. But before they made that rule, see, like the rules kind of changed like throughout the time I was there before those rules came. Literally the entire school would have like green, yellow, blue, purple, like everywhere. It wasn't like zones like it is now or was. I don't know if this is making any sense. But basically when I was there and the part that I liked was having the entire school covered with rainbow, everything, because of all the colors and the grades coming and decorating the school. And then they changed the rules and, you know, their zones now. So like all green here and then all orange here. Yeah, I don't know. I liked it the old way where everyone tried to outdo each other and like, you know, cover the tree in green and yellow and blue and all of that stuff. Another thing I forgot to mention about Color Wars is each grade got to do a performance. I might have mentioned this earlier, but I don't remember hearing it. Each class got to do a performance and the seniors got to be last. And this was kind of before our performance started and all of the majors would come together and perform. So, you know, probably the middle schoolers had one day to do their performances and then the high schoolers had their days to do their performance. And the seniors always got more time and everything to get all ready. I also wanted to add, I don't think going to an art school is like the show Victorious. I actually had to look up the show Victorious because I know that Nickelodeon did something about a performing art school. And everyone like would ask us like, Oh, is it like Victorious or this on the other? And I was like, I don't really think so. I never really watched the video, but if I describe something like in the show, let me know down below. Also, it was kind of weird because I mean, I don't know if it's still like this or if it was like a joke in my friend group or something. But we were kind of known as the gay school, which isn't bad. It was just like kind of funny. And if you like, we're dating someone like that didn't go to like ox or anything. It's like, Oh, what school does he go to? It was always like so scandalous. At least I felt like it was. We didn't have any sports if you're wondering that. Another thing I wanted to add, which I didn't realize how much I forgot to mention. A lot of our school students got to do really cool things. Just recently, we had some performers go to Carnegie Hall and perform there. And then three of the dancers from AXA were on. So you think you can dance, which is another cool thing. And then during my time there, we had people from our band go and perform at Obama's inauguration. So I just wanted to add those cool things that some students got to do. The last thing I kind of wanted to cover in this video was our graduation. Our graduation was so cool. It wasn't like any other graduations because we have a theater. Our graduation was hosted in the theater and it was kind of like a dress up of it. Well, I mean, all graduations are dress up event, but there was actual performances. Each major was represented by the senior class and they would put together a senior project kind of and come together and have a performance for graduation. From what I remember, I think we did the dance after we walked. I could be misled or I could be missing something. But I feel like we walked and then did the dance. That's what I think. But I'm not sure. Basically, our graduation was filled with performances and walking across the stage. And because our school isn't that big, all of the seniors could fit on the stage. So at the end, we were all standing. We weren't really sitting. We were standing on the stage. So anyway, that is going to be it for this video. I hope you guys enjoyed it. If you guys enjoyed this video, give it a big thumbs up. Don't forget to subscribe to my channel. If you guys have any other questions or I may have confused you on something, please let me know down below. And if you go to an art school, let me know how it was. What was your experience like? Anyways, that is it, and I'll see you guys in my next video. Bye.