Extracurricular by Diamon

Extracurricular by Diamon - October 2015 Scholarship Essay

Diamon Goodwin
Varsity Tutors
Scholarship Essay
14 October 2015
Extracurricular Activities
Extracurricular activities don’t spark the interest of every student, some students believe that extracurricular activities aren’t important at all and just want to go to school for their education. Meanwhile, others do like to participate in extracurricular activities because they may think that school won’t be “fun” unless they are a part of an extracurricular activity. In my opinion, extracurricular activities can be a great thing to be a part of, but it should not be required for high school graduation.
As said before, there are students that are simply uninterested in participating in extracurricular activities. These students may be more in tuned in their education and spend a lot of their time doing homework, studying, or even reading. These are the students who may also be in different clubs such as book club or national history club. They also may compete in science and math competitions. While there is nothing wrong with being in an extracurricular activity, being more in tuned in their education gives them a better opportunity at being well prepared for college. Considering that college is the next step after high school, these students will be academically advanced because how of they’ve practiced before in high school.
Some students that do participate in extracurricular activities end up more focused on the activity and not focused enough on school. Although, some schools have policies to where a student would have to have a certain grades to participate, this encourages them to do the minimum and not what they should be doing. Also, being in extracurricular activities means they have practices and meetings. This gives the students less time to study and do homework. For example, a student could get up for school at 6:30am, from 8:00am to 2:45pm they attend school, and practice could be held 3:15pm to 5:15pm, they get home at 5:30pm and have to do chores and homework, the time could be 6:30pm which means they’ve now been up for 12 hours straight now. They then have to eat dinner and may be responsible for cleaning the kitchen afterwards, the time now could be 8:00pm. They now just have to shower and get to bed which after that, it could be 9:00pm. Adding the time that students nowadays spend on social media, it could be 11:00pm before this students gets to sleep which means they’ve been awake for 16 hours straight and now will only receive 7 ½ hours of sleep. Studies show that teenagers need 8 to 9 hours of sleep every night to be rejuvenated for the next day. With the extracurricular activity, a student wouldn’t receive the amount of sleep they need to be mentally and physically focused for school the next day. This brings it back to the main point of the students doing the bare minimum to get by in school, which doesn’t prepare them academically for the next step, which is college.
If extracurricular activities were required for graduation, there would be a significant amount of student that wouldn’t participate because of personal problems which means they then wouldn’t graduate. Extracurricular activities can be costly and with every parent not being able to pay for them, every student doesn’t get an equal chance to graduate. A family could also, not own a car. This means they wouldn’t be able to get back and forth to practices and games. Things like this give the less fortunate students an unfair chance at school.
There would be a lot of disadvantages if extracurricular activities were required for high school graduation. My personal opinion on this would for it to not be required because of the disadvantages. Not one student should be forced to participate in an extracurricular activity to receive their diploma.