I’ve been waiting for this year of my life for as long as I can remember. Senior year is the year that every high schooler waits for and dreams about and it definitely lives up to the hype. To me, being a senior brings a feeling of importance and leadership and I believe we should be treated that way. As an 18 year-old who has been through almost four years here, I can speak for almost everyone in the class of 2015, if not the entire student body (who will eventually be seniors), by saying that it is unreasonable to enforce a silent study hall every day.

This rule has caused more problems than it has fixed. Being in an all senior study hall, almost none of us have homework and half of the kids just sit there silently. We are not allowed to take out our phones, listen to music with headphones, or even sleep. Teachers claim that we need to be productive, but if we have no homework, what are they expecting us to do? In response to a teacher who claims that they need silence to be productive, I would argue that as a teacher, they are expected to work in loud environments all the time, such as when students are working in group projects. If a teacher really can’t handle a little noise for 23 minutes, they should request to monitor a sophomore or junior study hall.

Not allowing phones or music in study halls also causes more conflict and more detentions to write up when students are caught with their phones. If teachers just trusted us and let us look at our phones or listen to music without it affecting them in any way, there would be no arguments. This is also not fair to the kids who were not issued a school chromebook. It is unfair that students who have a chromebook are able to go on the same sites that just about every kid with a smartphone would be on.

My study hall teacher’s famous line is, “You have plenty of time to talk during passing periods.” Even though six minutes may be a long time to talk, most of that time is spent at our lockers and rushing to our next class. Being in such a large school, the odds of seeing your friends during passing periods and actually having time to talk to them are almost nonexistent.

With the new addition of chromebooks and all the new sites teachers frequently use such as Haiku and Google Drive, about half of the homework we are given is online. Study halls are in place to study and get homework done, but when a lot of our work is online, we can’t be expected to be productive because the devices we need to use are prohibited.

Just this year, a new policy was adopted allowing students to use electronics during lunch periods. If electronics are allowed in a large room with almost no way to monitor them, why are they not allowed in a classroom setting with better means of monitoring it?

Assistant Principal Thomas Kurzawski said, ”We just looked at the fact that some students, as now we went to chromebooks, may want to open up their chromebook and do some studying…it’s really kind of a trial, we wanted to see how it would go so we said let’s let them use their phones too and were hoping that its for educational reasons.”

If the staff trusts students during lunch, there is no reason that they can take away that privilege during study hall.

Teachers always claim that some kids actually want to get work done, but they never actually ask the class. I understand that some students do actually utilize their study hall period to get homework done, and the volume level should definitely be kept down for them, but it is unfair to make the whole class sacrifice their time. In the real world, it will never be one hundred percent silent when we need to get work done. In almost any job setting, there is always conversation and distractions going on that we will have to learn how to deal with. Silent study halls are training us to need complete silence in order to get anything done, which will only hurt us in the long run.

Senior year is supposed to be a student’s transition year into college, but if our teachers are still babying us and not letting us have the opportunity to be responsible and manage our time how we want to, college will be a rude awakening. In college, we will have way more responsibility than we are used to, so if teachers are not training us to know how to handle us in even the smallest aspect of highschool, we will not adjust well. As an 18 year old and legal adult, I don’t think it is unreasonable to be allowed to make my own decisions.