Food for Thought by Hunter

Food for Thought by Hunter - October 2015 Scholarship Essay

School is an endless buffet of rotten cheese and spoiled milk, and today’s students have a lot on their plates. Against our will, we are woken up at a preposterous hour and summoned to the gates of hell in order to get this lousy thing they call an “education.” If you aren’t a morning person like myself and every other sane person, this is a difficult task alone. We are then required to zombie around campus for seven hours, merely as an excuse for teachers to assign us more work to do at home. With college admissions valuing extracurricular activities more and more each year, it is vital that students load their résumés with clubs, sports, and work in order to draw interest from universities. However, extracurricular activities should not be required for high school graduation.

Graduation is awarded to those who adequately managed themselves in the classroom for the entire twelve years of their educational journey. What students do outside of school should not be reflected in the classroom or in their ability to graduate. The word “curricular” is defined as all the courses of study offered by an educational institution. Extracurricular is simply anything added to the plethora of work students are already given. While attendance and effort in the classroom is mandatory, anything done once you escape the agony of the everyday prison should be optional.

Let’s break this down from a fundamental standpoint. I was taught (in school) that there is 24 hours in a single day. Psychologists claim that teenagers need more sleep than any other group of people— roughly nine and a half hours per night. I am tormented by the most annoying and dreaded noise from my alarm clock at 5:45 A.M. for five days a week. Now, let’s do a little math (also something I was taught in school). If I were to sleep the recommended amount of time every night I would need to hit the hay at 8:15 P.M. I get home from school, exhausted, at 2 P.M. every day. Eating dinner takes about 30-45 minutes of my time, chores take at least an hour, showering and getting ready for bed is a 30 minute process, exercise to maintain my health takes about an hour and homework consumes an average of about three hours a night. If your math teacher is as good as mine, you will notice that this leaves absolutely no time for any extracurricular activities.

A recent study shows that high school students today have the same anxiety levels as insane asylum mental patients in the 1950’s— clearly there is something wrong. If extracurricular activities were a requirement for graduation, stress for students would reach levels this world has never seen. Give this generation a break and don’t make extracurricular activities a requirement, we are already forced to gag down what is on our plates.