Opinion: We should cultivate healthy exercise habits from a young age
Regardless of what extracurricular activities kids choose to participate in, it is important for them to find ways to move their bodies in order to remain healthy in the future. This gets increasingly difficult as kids grow older and balance more responsibilities, which is I why I believe encouraging healthy and fun exercise is important to cultivate good future habits.
Opinion: Grade inflation is harmful in the long term
There has been an ongoing trend in the United States of grade inflation in many schools, and while this may be beneficial for students in the short term because they have better grades, this does not improve their learning. This desire for high grades at any cost can often lead to cheating and not actually retaining the information, which I discuss in this article.
Opinion: Religion must be kept out of public schools
The First Amendment makes it explicitly clear that the government is not to be entangled with religion, but this has become more difficult and debated when it comes to education. With the recent developments in Louisiana and differing political opinions on the extent that religious ideals can be incorporated into public schools, I wanted to express my opinion on the subject.
Opinion: Social media is promoting excessive overconsumption
With the rise of social media, viral trends have become increasingly common, with influencers constantly encouraging their followers to buy new things in order to keep up with these changes. In this piece, I wanted to explore the negative side of this encouragement and normalization of overconsumption and the effects it has.
Opinion: Schools need stricter cell phone policies
Phones in schools has been an ongoing debate, and I wanted to address the topic based on how it has affected me. While phones can be incredibly beneficial, they are extremely distracting, as I have found and many others. They disrupt classroom focus and thus I believe they should be limited in schools in order to improve productivity and interpersonal relationships.
Opinion: American high schools should require geography
Virtually every high school in the United States requires history or some form of social studies, but geography is often overlooked. Knowledge of geography is a vital skill that helps create better critical thinkers and more informed voters and global citizens; the stereotype that Americans do not know geography often holds true, and I think this has real-world ramifications of how we interact with each other and on a national level.
Opinion: Girls clothing perpetuates harmful narratives
Stereotypes on how girls should look an act are quite common from a young age. Growing movements to change this have had a lot of success, but girls clothing is significantly smaller or shorter than boys clothing from a young age, even though their bodies being virtually the same. believe this has underlying messages about the structure of our society and things we hold important that I wanted to explore.
Opinion: Technology should not replace all jobs
The use of technology and artificial intelligence in the workplace are increasingly debatable topics. While they are efficient in replacing some tasks that can be accomplished more effective technologically, I believe entire widespread use of technology in places like restaurants, as opposed to human servers, has negative social ramifications in terms of jobs and basic interactions shown to improve our mental health.
Opinion: Mental health resources should not be the only solution
As people push for gun control legislation, there is pushback that we should instead focus on mental health treatment in schools which will help potential shooters. I believe that while mental health treatment can be effective, it should not be the only solution, because the bottom line is, if guns were more controlled, the people needing this treatment would not have access to them in the first place.
Opinion: Politicians need a middle ground to fix climate change
Climate change is a highly debatable topic in the United States and globally, with certain politicians or political parties unwilling to make changes on both sides. Thus, I think both sides need to come to some sort of agreement or compromise, because any steps in the direction of greener practices are better than no progress at all. No solution is going to be perfect, but some sort of action needs to be taken.