Putting the Mustang student body in Muzzles, DGS is cracking down on new policies. While I understand that it is with the students’ best interests at heart, this year’s policies feel dystopian.
It begins the moment you walk in. The staff has become quite adamant this year about using your student identification barcode, physical or digital, to scan into the school and every class throughout your day.
My issue here is the wifi. You need wifi to access your digital student identification, and in some parts of the school, wifi is super flaky. It makes scanning in very inconvenient for students who use their phones, not to mention the double standards regarding phones, but we’ll address that later.
With the school watching us like hawks, anxiety is heightened for most students, with everyday tasks becoming stressful. For example, I rush to class thinking I will be tardy when that has never been an issue for me in the past. It just feels excessive.
The bathrooms are also nuts; you’re not allowed to use the bathroom in the first or last 10 minutes of class, and you only have 27 minutes of class to go to the bathroom. Since it’s in the middle of the class, you’ll miss some of the learning, so teachers are already going to be reluctant to let you go. It honestly just feels like no one is winning in this situation.
Walking around DGS used to feel light-hearted. I was excited to see my friends and I had fun here. Now I walk the halls like I’ll get punished if I’m a second late to class, I’m having little to no fun during the school day, and when the bell rings, it feels freeing.
To recap, DGS has control over our time, location and now personal property. At the beginning of every class, we are required to put our cell phones in the designated class cubbies. While the rule is seemingly disliked, it too is justified.
I think it is very disrespectful that teachers who chose this profession to enrich young minds are getting ignored instead. And as a student, I can acknowledge my job here is to learn, and we could all stand to cut down our screen time a little.
But the cons to this rule are also very clear. For one, contact. What if I need to contact my parents for something, or I need to send a photo or document from my phone to my computer for a school assignment? I also never really went on my phone in class before, but as usual, just a few people ruined it for everybody, and now we all have to adhere to these rules.
There could have been much less drastic measures taken pertaining to the phones.
But fear not, as I’ve prepared a solution. Keeping your phone zipped up in your bag, simple as that.
The problem over the last few years is that teachers never actually issued the punishments they were supposed to if they saw phones, which is why kids went on their phones in class. If they’re just going to get a warning or a slap on the wrist, what’s the harm in continuing to use them?
In my honest opinion, I don’t understand how some of these policies are in the students’ best interest. Every day, I feel more and more anxious entering this building. The new rules are too much to keep up with, and it doesn’t feel like we’re just being tested academically anymore, but also socially.
