by David Hermanson, Staff Writer, November 2021

While roaming the halls and reading some old Noblemans the other day, I came to the conclusion that our lives, simply put, are full of woe, anguish, and misery. While previously I believed myself to be privileged, my eyes have been opened to the injustices society has committed to us here at Nobles, and now I stand firmly with the idea that students are an endangered group in need of further care and support. Today, we stand as a student body more battered than any other high school, perhaps more than any other college, perhaps even any other institution in the country. In fact, why stop there? According to Nobles students, we are the most mistreated group that has ever and will ever exist in all of space and time. 

We are tortured daily. The stress of elite schooling has burdened us so greatly that we have no choice but to crawl sobbing to our Teslas and ride back to our massive houses and send angry emails to our handpicked advisors. If things get really heated, we have to go through the agony of sitting down with our teachers and having a one-on-one dialogue with them after class, or, even worse, sit with them in our Castle and discuss our problems over a plate of school-provided delicious ramen. It’s a tough life here. 

Perhaps Nobles students are being a bit hyperbolic in their complaints.

It may be time for the community to spend more time acknowledging the prevalence of veiled ungratefulness that has infiltrated our expectations of what our school should look like. It seems the student body has lost sight of the larger successes that our school shares and instead has opted to point to the few issues that are holding us back. Perhaps Nobles has lost sight of its greatness. 

It seems, given the complaints stated earlier, that there is a plague of underlying petulance that seems to have been spreading throughout the community the past few years. It may be true that we don’t get as much sleep as we would like, or that we occasionally get sick of the constant Pasta Wednesdays, but is it really all that bad? Are we being forced to come here? The question has a simple answer: no. As things are, it seems that students everywhere are constantly looking for the next minor disagreement with the school board to complain about.  

In college admissions for example, many condemn the Nobles culture of competitiveness while also participating in it themselves. Many within the school have decided to view the resources being offered to them as a threat, rather than a privilege. They condemn the constant presence of college advisors and teachers watchful eyes as an act of unneeded diligence, and an indication that Nobles is obsessed with only the success of its students, when in reality it is an expression of Nobles’s desire to aid students in a process that is already stressful. Without this support, the college process would be even worse. 

In addition to this, there is also a developing culture of work-phobia. Rather than approach learning with the fervor of students who have been granted a spot in an esteemed private school, it seems many are disinterested in actually participating in their own education. There is a culture of diligence at Nobles, that’s true, but there is also a culture of hesitancy to work as well. While burnout and excessive workload are fair issues, generally speaking, most teachers are empathetic to their students and will avoid sucking up their time with needless assignments, making these points null a large percentage of the time.

Without making any declarative statements, it may be time that students expressed more gratitude when it comes to the resources being offered at the school.