The official site of the Torch, the student-run newspaper at Glenbrook North High School.

Torch

The official site of the Torch, the student-run newspaper at Glenbrook North High School.

Torch

The official site of the Torch, the student-run newspaper at Glenbrook North High School.

Torch

My three additional gripes

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Kleenex

Ranking high among the world’s most desperate crises is our school’s facial tissue issue. Teachers beg and plead with us every August to solve this horrifying problem, then December arrives and alas, we have no Kleenex. Then we complain that teachers should bring in the tissues, to which they often reply, “That’s not my job.”

I’m not saying I don’t contribute to the problem. Even though one of my greatest fears in life is sneezing in class, I’ve never brought in a box of Kleenex for the class.

Tissue
Photo by Gabe Weininger. Click to enlarge.

But the solution is obvious. Just bring in your own Kleenex. In fact, bring some for the room. How hard could it possibly be to buy a pack of eight boxes at Target? You don’t even have to get it yourself, I’m sure your parents would love to.

If everyone in the school brought one Kleenex box for each class, which is very reasonable, we could possibly be set for years. Just imagine having endless tissues in every class forever.

Wouldn’t that be something.

Mandatory field trips

I don’t know when teachers and club sponsors started calling everything mandatory, but it has to stop. The only things that are truly mandatory in school are attending classes and staying alive. Don’t get me wrong, I agree completely when teachers remind us to breathe and check our pulses regularly to make sure we’re not dead when a movie is playing in the front of a dark room at 7:40 a.m. It is reasonable to expect that students are alive during class.

But no field trip is mandatory. And teachers must agree that the kids who want to be in school, learning, rather than go on some lackadaisical venture to the outside are the kinds of kids they should want in their class, no?

Perhaps even more ridiculous than the field trips themselves are teachers’ threats of make-up assignments for students who do not attend.

Assigning a 15-page single-spaced essay as an alternative is basically telling students, “This field trip is mandatory.” And no field trip is mandatory, no matter how you spin it. School is.

Food outside the cafeteria

With the new strictness of parapros to keep food inside the cafeteria, students have been complaining more and more about not being allowed to bring food out.

Pick a side, students. Either complain about the cockroaches or complain about how you can’t bring food out of the designated area to eat food.

And where are we even bringing it? What are we doing that couldn’t be accomplished in the cafeteria? We can talk to people in the cafeteria. We all have portable computers. Do we just seek the thrill of breaking rules that can’t really get us in trouble?

Maybe if we were smuggling Kleenex I would be okay with it.