High school accounts for roughly 5,173 hours of our lives. In these hours we are setting ourselves up for the remaining 531,644 hours we have left on this planet. We sit in our provided desks listening to our elders drill random knowledge into our eardrums, through our ossicles, into our cochlea, for seven hours a day, five days a week. This may feel as if it is boring and pointless. It may seem as if there is no point in being here. I understand this; I probably never needed to know that cellular respiration produces 32-36 ATP, and I probably won’t ever use that knowledge again. However, no matter how much we all complain and don’t want to admit it, we have to realize there is a point to it all. High school is setting us up for success as long as we let it.
This is the start of what we will be dealing with for the rest of our lives. Listening to teachers builds our ability to apply and learn. Both of those things will make us employable. Studying and homework teach us to problem solve on our own. Going to school, in general, is going to help us when we’re out of high school. In order to make money and afford to live we have to work. As students, if we don’t discipline ourselves now and just show up, how are we going to be able to go to work for the same amount of time? Going to school isn’t hard it’s something we get to do. For a lot of places in the world going to school isn’t an option. I couldn’t imagine not being able to read and write. It is stupid for us as students to take advantage of taxpayers’ hard-earned money to not at least apply ourselves. By not trying the slightest in school you are only hurting yourself.
We derive endless possibilities from high school. If you’re a freshman or sophomore now and you don’t know what you want to be, what is the point in not setting yourself up for good? Maybe your senior year you find something you’re really interested in, that you have to go to a college or trade school. There are scholarships for everything, so don’t set yourself up now to not be considered for those scholarships. Maybe going into the workforce is what you want to do, but employers want employees who are hard-working and personable, not someone who doesn’t do anything more than the bare minimum.
It’s not the subjects we learn in school that are important, because honestly, we won’t remember what was on the test 30 years from now. The experiences, memories, and life lessons school gives are what is valuable. Personally I want to look back thirty years from now and remember the people, the clubs I was in, the school dances, the teachers who helped me, the games I attended. We will never get these years back, so don’t dread school, because honestly, it’s not that bad. It’s these times we will look back on and tell our kids about. Don’t you want to be proud of yourself and have something to show for these four years, because you will never have this opportunity again.