There are so many examples of school epidemics and many new school epidemics have arisen in the past couple of years that it makes me wonder what the future holds.

The definition of an epidemic is something that often suddenly has a huge increase of a specific thing/action and if you think about certain things that students do that can fall under this category. Some of the most prevalent examples is vaping which suddenly took teenage school life by surprise and changed school life for most teens.

Both substances that can be vaped are equally dangerous. First there’s nicotine which is highly addictive and is made in different “popular” flavors from anything like Sour Patch Kids to different flavored drinks which makes it easier to get addicted to. And with how many teenagers think that smoking is cool, I would expect there is a large group of teenagers at every school that is addicted to nicotine. The other is weed/THC which is considered an extremely addictive drug and is a big problem in the school setting it’s considered the Gateway drug which is worrying for the future of our students. This is a real problem that needs to be addressed considering how much the growing brain can be affected by Drugs and other influences such as alcohol too. The main problem is that it’s so accessible to the average teenager that the environment might be the main cause of this problem.

But school epidemics don’t necessarily have to be harmful such as skipping class most students if not all have skipped class once in school, especially if the class is considered boring and gives no incentive to the student to show up to the class and participate which is another example. Participation can be a hard thing for some students and sometimes it’s not even the student’s fault. It could be a home problem or it could even be the teacher. Most teachers are great but some teachers just don’t care and sit on their phones during class which doesn’t help students want to learn. All the teacher does is put the directions on the screen and sit on their phones all class and expect students to do their job when the teacher can’t do theirs. But by far the most influential are social media and phone usage. Phones are used in everyday life and can be very useful to a certain extent but in everyday class, most students are on their phones during lessons and don’t care unless they are threatened with their phone getting taken away or getting sent to the office. The main issue is Tik Tok which took the world by storm with how easy it is to scroll and watch short clips of interesting content. Most students have a short attention span, they get lost in their phones for the whole class and forget to do work and end up falling behind in the class. These are just some of the most prominent issues that we as students face of have to be around. But if you look closely enough, you can probably find way more problems in the school system that need to be addressed. At the end of the day, people live how they want to live and everybody has the free will to do what they want in this free country.