One Hat, Two Hat, Three Hat, Four Hat

Senior Molly Etscheid

There is a certain stereotype or stigma surrounding teens and affecting how they are perceived. Many people think that teenagers are lazy; they sit around on their phones, play games or scroll through social media. However, being an average modern teenager comes with a lot of responsibilities. Many teenagers wear multiple different hats.

Not only do students come to school for 7 hours a day, but many also have jobs or sports games/practices afterward. This truly leaves little time to do homework, hang out with friends or do chores. With such little free time, it is difficult to keep up with friendships, relationships or being a child.

Junior and senior students are facing the challenges of making future decisions. Do I want to work, go to college, enter the trades, join the military? If students are thinking about college, then they must start applying to schools, visiting them and thinking about classes they should be taking in high school. Students thinking about the military have to contact recruiters and students thinking about work must find a job to pursue. Thinking about and planning for the future is like a part-time job. Doing research, applying and committing is a lengthy process and can be a lot to think about causing stress for students. Although freshman and some sophomore students do not need to worry about jobs or the future yet, they still have a lot of responsibilities with chores, sports, friendships or homework.

Freshman Haley Solan has a part-time job at Tone’s Cones and Tone’s Doghouse. She also plays sports and is a part of Operation Snowflake. She estimates that when she gets home from work or sports, she spends about 2 hours doing chores before being able to wind down and relax. “Sometimes I do not sleep because I am up late at sports or at work, then I have to come home and study for a test the next day. On average I say I get maybe 5-6 hours of free time a week,” Solan said. She says those 5-6 hours do not feel like enough for as hard as she works during the week. She agrees that many people have placed a stereotype around teenagers. “They assume that whenever we look at our phones we are ‘addicted.’ If we have a password, then we are hiding something. If we sit down, we are lazy. If we go out, then we are going to do drugs and make bad decisions.” Even as a freshman, Solan wears many hats, which will only multiply moving forward.

Personally, I have two part-time jobs, participate in track, take college classes and have an internship lined up for the summer. I do all this while maintaining good grades, friendships/relationships, committing to college and doing co-op. I can say it is definitely not easy, and many people overlook how much work students put into their everyday lives.

An anonymous sophomore student said, “This is our experimental phase, let us just enjoy ourselves. We are not going to get all the free time we have now in 10 years. We need to live our lives while we can, and all parents really need to do is just make sure that your kid knows that you are there for us if we ever need anything. Do not take away our young years because you want us to be perfect. If we mess up, that is our fault, and we will learn from it. We are trying to be more individual to see what we really want in life, let us figure it out how we want to.”

Thank your students for all the hard work they put in day in and day out.

Helmet Project Senior Masen Libby

For the final project in Leah Kuhn’s Crafts class, students must either create a helmet from scratch or add on to an existing helmet to match their apocalyptic world that they brainstormed and sketched out. For the students who decided to make their own out of cardboard, they had to papier mâché the piece and gesso it. Gesso is used to make the surface smoother and better for painting. “It’s taken a while but I like it,” junior Jasmine Reyes said, “It’s cool seeing the helmet come together.”