Rooms that involve science (Junyoung)

Students have greatly varying opinions on the quality of certain teachers – good or bad, comfortable or fearful, worthy of presents or worthy of murderous intent – that influence the way they act in that class. But no matter how the teacher carries themselves, they will always evoke one particular phenomenon in student activity: procrastination. As I procrastinate on this essay, I distinctly remember last Friday, when I was procrastinating on my biology homework in Mr. Creighton’s room: there were procrastinating freshman a plenty in the room, painfully procrastinating and pushing their pencils and powerful minds to their full potential as they purposefully plagiarized in front of their pessimistic professor. I had watched, chuckling, before realizing that I had to do my own science homework, causing me to stop pestering the poor freshmen and rush off to the computer to blatantly rewrite sections from the book.

Mr. Creighton’s room evokes a certain quality that encourages such antics: the room is about as messy as the students’ own rooms at home which makes it feel familiar and lets the freshman feel as if they are able to be as loud and silly as they want. Because of this, the room does tend to get incredibly obnoxious in volume level, usually caused by flamboyant freshman who smell of the certain fragrance known as “lack of shower.” It also has several working computers and many desks, making it a wonderful place to work on homework one did not do at home. There are also activities to partake in when a student isn’t procrastinating, plagiarizing, or panicking-The abundance of noisy and boisterous freshmen makes the classroom a social beehive, turning lunch into a rambunctious affair, with students eating plastic-like foods and speaking amusing words to one another.

In the midst of the chaos of the classroom, I began to wonder why the freshmen did what they were doing, and why I did exactly the same last year. Other than the question of why the socializing underclassmen were not doing their homework they should have done at home, even the freshmen who were doing their unfinished assignments evoked the mystery of why they didn’t merely finish at home. One cannot blame them, of course: they are high school students. Teenagers do not make good decisions: this is a fact of life. They do not do homework at home, they do not listen in class, they do not close the browser so they are not distracted by facebook when working on essays, and they do not do many actions that would make a great deal of sense. I remember, many years ago, reading an article in which I learned that the portion of the brain that handles decision making is not fully developed even past the age of eighteen, so those under that seemingly far away age cannot be blamed for making poor choices.

Unfortunately for students, high school is a time of many life changing decisions. The students in that classroom h ave chosen what classes to take to have prepared knowledge for college, and by extension, their future careers. They are choosing what friends they make and which they will stay in contact with throughout their lifetime. They are choosing whether or not they will try hard and finish all our homework at home to get good grades or if we’ll procrastinate and let our grades sink down. That is, after all, what high school is: a sink or swim environment. One can become a master at managing your schedule and swim high above other students with your already completed homework, flop frantically to finish your homework right before class before the ensnaring jaws of the teacher’s gradebook traps you, or sink and watch your grade plummet alongside them.

In Mr. Creighton’s classroom, one year ago, a chair was slammed onto a table by a rather angry young man, cursing loudly. This incident was not caused directly by grades, but school, as a major part of a student’s life, must have had an impact on his potentially deteriorating mental state. I, personally, have received the impression from high school that one must take all honors and all advanced placement classes if one even wants the slightest chance of getting into a high-end college. As such, when I sink and my grades plummet, my charisma and enjoyment of life sink as well. The piles and piles of homework that are tossed onto us slowly weigh down the student body, and some slip through the cracks of the net. With this schedule of writing and failing and equating and failing and working and failing and procrastinating and failing, the constant failure is bound to drive some students mad.

For example, the very day I wrote this essay, as I arrived home from school, I received my report card. Afterwards, I had a breakdown and locked myself in the bathroom, refusing to leave for the span of an hour. Afterwards, I screamed at my mom to leave my room, threw half of my belongings at the wall, and barricaded the door and refused to speak with anyone.

School is not as difficult for all students. Some students can get away with doing their homework in a messy room at the last moment before class starts and still get straight As. I am not that person, and neither are a lot of people. Someone like myself cannot make the necessary decisions to merely stop getting bad grades, leading to sadness, which leads to escapism. People like me watch silly children’s television, play computer games, roleplay on the internet, and do anything that isn’t homework in order to escape reality and forget that grades, teachers, classrooms, and all of that nasty, real world stuff does not exist.

Which, invariably, will lead to us doing homework at the last minute in a messy classroom that belongs to one Mr. Creighton.