7. School

"What do you fear, my lady?" he asked.
"A cage," she said. "To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire."
- Aragorn and Eowyn (The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, J.R.R Tolkien)



About midway through last year's English class I wrote a piece that I titled, "My Prison," that somehow fit into the overall scope of the required writing. I'd like to provide that work from last year for you all to read, as most of what is said in it is still applicable to my current state (it is also interesting to note how my writing has changed and grown from even just a year ago).

My Prison

School is my prison. This is not to be ungrateful of the great school I know I attend, but rather to express my misgivings towards many of its lacking features. The monotonous, routine life of school coupled with the suffocating environment has led to a grueling experience with school for the past several years.
Like a prison, school has the same monotonous routine day after day, year after year, with almost no variation. While at school, one attends the same classes with the same students in the same classroom every day for a year. Individuals in the halls pass the same people at the same time going the same way every day for a year. At home from school, one will typically follow the same schedule. In my case, my home schedule involves continuing my school experience with hours of homework.

The ever continuous life of school directly leads to the suffocation I feel grasping for me. There is no escape from school. I spend all my time (except for my time with God) either at school, doing school work, or recuperating from school. It is unavoidable. The only other option I have would be to give up and drop out, but I know it is futile to do so. Serving out my sentence is the only reasonable possibility I have.

My biggest struggle with school for the past few years has been in discovering its value. In the long run I know school is beneficial, but I fail to see the benefits of a sustained general education. Since my birth I have been trained in my knowledge of life. School has continued this process and expanded my knowledge as well as my ability to communicate ideas. At this point in my education career though, I believe I should be trained specifically for my long term career goal. After 17 years of general knowledge and education, a more specified approach is what I, and my peers, should be getting. Instead of focusing on all areas of education, students should be able to choose their career path and advance the individual skill set involved with that choice.

Additionally, the large amount of time I spend completing school work detracts time from other important features of my life. I am forced to abstain from being with my friends on most occasions, leading to an increase in my already present introverted personality. The stress created by school causes me to become irritable and snap at my parents and siblings, which is never a good thing. I am also constantly under the pain of headaches due to the stress. Most detrimentally though, school forces me to spend less time developing my relationship with God and my fellow Christian brothers. I must either forget about school, forget about God, stay up way past the new day, or have quick ten minute to one hour sessions alone with my Savior. For myself I choose to continue with both school and God, by having short personal times alone with God. However, I hardly see this situation as ideal; I am giving God, the Creator of the Universe, my spare time. I struggle with finding the fix for this situation though, as I can’t give up school, nor is it feasible for me to live off of 3-4 hours a night.

In all of these ways school serves as my prison. The time I spend in school seems wasteful and unproductive, I am unable to escape from its grasp, it is routine and monotonous, and it detracts from time I could be valuably spending.

The main alteration from my mindset back in Junior year to this date, as I approach my graduation date, is that now I have even less of a desire to spend my time at school as I did a year ago. This shift stems primarily from the events occurring in and around my family. Each and every school day is a huge struggle to remain focused and attentive in class because I wish I could be sitting at the hospital with Jared. Whether he is alert and functional or curled up in a ball in pain, my desire is to be there for him as a brother and a friend. Or I could be helping Abbey through her struggles. Instead, I have been forced to enter into perhaps the most hostile environment that exists on this planet, the high school. Fortunately, I have a personality that enables most negative comments to bounce off, but after a time, even my defenses wear down, leaving me vulnerable to an influx of negativity. The vast majority of Upper Arlington students exude an air of "entitlement." By this I mean that the students at UA act as if they are deserving of every good thing that comes along: new Ipads, new computers, new cars, good grades, lacrosse championships, scholarships, girlfriends, perfect teachers etc. As each year passes the attitude progressively becomes more extreme. The true problem with this though, is that, as students feel more and more as if they can receive whatever they desire, work ethic plummets. Subsequently, or consequently, students also spend more and more time involved in the "party" scene because they are no longer confided to the "academic" scene.

For me this creates huge issues, because hearing the majority of students at school discuss how they are wasting their lives is next to the last thing I wish to be doing. It is brutal to hear kids (and not just random kids, my classmates, the kids I have matured next to for the past 12+ years) discuss how they can't remember who they ended up sleeping with over the weekend, or how they almost died while they drove home from a party, or how they managed to run away from a group of cops after their party was busted. I wish I could drag those kids to the hospital with me, take them all to the J-5 cancer floor at Children's Hospital and show them the kids there. Beautiful few week and month old infants and their families who haven't left the cancer floor yet, because their newborn is receiving drugs whose entire purpose is to destroy cells in the body-good and bad. Upper Arlington students think they suffer, but they have no concept of suffering. For a number of cancer patients, they cannot even bear to have a sheet placed over them, because even its incredible lightweight fiber is enough to cause the patient to scream and writhe in agony owing to how badly their skin has been burned from the chemo treatment. That is suffering. Not having one's girlfriend deny them sex over the weekend. Yet that is the environment I am pushed into each day.

As such, I am forced to compartmentalize my life: school life and everything else. This compartmentalization puts a significant strain on me as I have to switch from these two extremes quickly. Just as an object experiences considerable wear and tear if it is rapidly moved from a heating environment to a freezing environment, so to, am I gradually being worn down by rapidly moving from these different climates....