The following op-ed piece was written by Cathedral Prep senior Steve Bretz. All opinions expressed are his own personal opinions.
Something serious is affecting Prep. It is within the student body and is spreading like wildfire. It passes through every classroom, impacts every student, and is affecting the Prep community. It leaves students distraught, angry, sad, and in bad moods. It has no positive effects and has the capability of turning brother on brother.
The concept I speak of is negativity, and recently Prep students have been exhibiting an awful of amount of it. The origins of this negativity can be derived from a multitude of things: bad weather, lack of sleep, personal issues, receiving too much work, etc. The list goes on and on and varies from student to student. Not all students are negative because of the same thing, but all students show their negativity the same harmful ways.
The first and most common way that students exhibit negativity is though the brining down of other students. No one respects one another or provides others with positive reinforcement. Instead, when students make a mistake or fail at proving a point they are ridiculed and called names. There is no effort done at all to handle the matter in a more positive fashion, and it almost seems as if the goal is to make the other students feel worse about themselves.
The result of this negative behavior can cause a chain reaction and go from student to student within the day. This behavior has affected Prep so much that it has altered the form of communication among students. Instead of being nice to each other and encouraging one another, many students communicate with a sarcastic negative tone. Few have conversations just for the sake of conversation. The underlying meaning of someone talking to another is to make them look foolish or uneducated on the topic.
Aside from student-to-student relations being a problem, students’ attitudes towards teachers have also become more negative. It is too rare that you hear a student at Prep talk about any teacher or administrator in high regards. They are often being condemned or slandered, talked about in a negative manner because of the homework they assign or difficulty of their classes. Only the teachers who assign easy assignments or hardly any work at all are talked about in a positive light, and nearly everyone else is disliked by the student body.
Negativity: it is something everyone experiences in their lives. Whether it be their own negativity or someone else’s negative energy affecting them, the results are the same nonetheless. Both students and teachers are victims of the negativity making its way through Prep. The best way to stop this negativity is by getting more sleep, eating healthier, having a more positive attitude and respecting authority. If these things are done, the disease can be stopped, but if ignored there’s no telling how long it could last.