Picture this: It is three in the morning on a school night in Port and all across town certain bedrooms have finally exhausted their lights, allowing their inhabitants to drift into a three to four hour long slumber. However, other room’s lights are just turning on, forcing those students to drag themselves out of bed and continue the work they had fallen asleep doing at midnight. When the sun rises, hordes of students walk through the front doors of Schreiber, too many in their just-rolled-out-of-bed outfits and caffeinated coffees in hand, to push through another day of overachievement.
In today’s competitive environment, the bulk of students load their college resumes and forfeit their own health for the sake of “their futures.” Large portions of students at Schreiber are enrolled in numerous honors classes, APs, and participate in honors projects. In this struggle to be the “well-rounded individual” that colleges so desperately want, too many of us have overloaded our weekly schedules, taking on clubs, in-school athletics, out-of-school teams, hours of extra classes, and volunteering, all on top of hours of homework.
It’s easy to spot these students as one scurries through the building between classes or has a conversation with a friend. These are the students forced to drink the disgusting cafeteria coffee when the January Port tundra is too disheartening for a Dunkin Donuts run.
These are the students so exasperated and fatigued that their headaches and nausea lead them to take a nap in the nurse’s office. These are the students who are so worried about a grade on one test that their entire day is spent studying notes and reading review books in the middle of their other extremely challenging classes, where paying attention would be more beneficial.
These are the students who relish Netflix time because it comes so rarely that any opportunity to be on their computers and not typing an essay or scrolling through WebAssign is absolute paradise. The students who rarely have a chance to watch their favorite hit shows during their actual air times, and have to wait until school breaks in order to binge watch what they have missed. To these students, free time is simply nonexistent. It is these same students who are barely able to enjoy off periods because the only benefit of them is a chance to spend more time during the week doing work rather than actually having “off.”
Maybe these students don’t show up to your first period class, but somehow magically appear in your third period class. They are up so late working or at late-night track meets that they have to sacrifice coming to school for their first couple of classes in order to get more sleep. These students are the ones so overworked that they frequently sleep through their (several) alarms and then freak out from the thought of missing important classwork. The students whose backpacks are stuffed to their maximum capacity with not just notebooks and binders but with SAT and ACT books as well.
“I’d love to give you a quote but I’m too busy studying for my APUSH test, physics test, math test, and English quiz,” said junior Anna Fox.
Though joking, Anna’s opinion is true: too many of us spend both our weekdays and our weekends engrossed in schoolwork, bent over our desks to complete the hours of work assigned to us from our advanced classes. Here’s to the near approach of midterms signaling just five more months of this academic struggle; here’s to looking forward to summer.