Do you know what it feels like to have an intense fear of going home because you don’t know what mood your parents are going to be in? Do you know what it feels like to have pain constantly reminding you that you haven’t eaten dinner in two days? Do you know what it’s like to live in a house that makes the Warsaw Ghetto look like the Palace of Versailles? Do you know what it feels like to cry yourself to sleep because you don’t know if your dying dad will ever call you his “little angel” again? If you’ve ever gone through any of these things, I am truly and deeply sorry. If you haven’t, consider yourself lucky. Consider yourself lucky that while you might not get the pair of boots you wanted, someone else might be working sixty hours every week just to put food on the table. We should consider ourselves lucky that we have parents who support our decisions. It is proven that parental encouragement can improve grades and raise self-esteem. Abusive or absent parents don’t encourage their kids. So where does that leave those kids?

Does anyone enjoy spending vacation time completing projects and immense amounts of homework? Does anyone enjoy missing out on parties, on visiting relatives, and going on vacation to do busywork, that, for the most part, is never even looked at or graded? Does anyone actually retain all or any of the information “learned” from summer assignments, or is it rushed to completion because you are not allowed out until it is done?

Do you ever take breaks while doing your homework? Do you use your phone during these breaks and find yourself opening several different social media apps? Amongst those apps, do you ever find yourself just scrolling through some nice photos, until all of a sudden you look up to check the time and it’s been a half hour or more? Now, I know this applies to more than 75 percent of the people in this room alone. Just think about how many people it affects in this school altogether. Let that sink in.

Summer assignments are often bemoaned by students as unnecessarily laborious and detracting from a much-needed two months of relaxation. This year's task for AP Language students, however, was designed...

3.8 trillion dollars: the national budget. 711 billion dollars: the national defense budget. America has the highest military spending in the world. Its defense budget exceeds that of 13 countries combined. As if this isn’t enough, Congress wishes to another 600 billion dollars for national defense. So, is there any question why we can’t help impoverished families?

Have you ever stopped to really think about how much electricity our school uses on a daily bases? If you haven’t, you’re not alone. I posed the same question to fifty students, from all different grades and backgrounds. A resounding 70 percent of my respondents said they never worried about it. As busy students, we oftentimes forget just how much of our school lives are powered by electricity. We take for granted our brightly lit hallways, our illuminated classrooms, and our fully charged tablets and computers. Our school relies on electricity in order to thrive, so wouldn’t it be great if Whitman could produce its own electricity by harnessing the power of the sun?

May I ask: who here can drive? Who here has taken those monotonous hours of a driver’s education course? Who here passed their road test and has a junior license? Who here drives to school? That’s what I thought. None of us can, for it is illegal. Most people share the common misconception that once you get your junior license, you can drive to school. Sounds familiar, right? Well, it’s not true. According to New York State DMV laws and regulations, students with a junior license cannot drive to school in neither Nassau or Suffolk Counties nor in any of the five boroughs. However, upstate New York, it is perfectly acceptable to drive to school with a junior’s license. Why is this?

Everyone in this room intends to succeed as a high school student, yes? As a fellow AP student, I understand and share the pressures being put on you as well as the stress schoolwork can bring. Succeeding in school is difficult. And the education system in place today increases that difficulty by preventing us students from fully understanding concepts that we are being taught and by hindering us from realizing our full intellectual potential.

We find ourselves here, in an AP classroom. We are the smart kids. We are the studiers, the thinkers, and the “leaders of tomorrow,” as the Board of Education likes to say. Isolated from the “regents kids,” we compete within our own faction of Whitman. And within our little faction, we find a series of sub-factions. Here, you will find both the apex students and the pseudo-academics.

Picture this. It’s 5 PM, and your practice just finished. It’s late. You’re exhausted. You want to go home. So you make your way to the bus platform to catch your bus. But there’s one problem. There is no bus. You know your parents aren’t out of work yet, and they’re half an hour away, anyway. So that is out of the question. The one friend you can ask for a ride is unavailable. The only option you’re left with is to walk home. You have to carry your school bag, clothes, shoes, equipment and gym bag. It’s already getting dark out. You’re cold and tired and have a 25-minute walk awaiting you. You don’t live in the safest neighborhood, but are left with no choice. So you take a chance. You brace yourself for the dangers and risks of the neighborhood and walk home.

You’re sitting in a classroom, watching another video for the third time this week on something that you haven’t even learned yet. You’re now sitting at home, trying to teach yourself difficult material because you hardly learned anything in class. Now, you’re taking a test and thinking to yourself, I know nothing. You can well assume that your teacher is not worried about complaints because they won’t affect his or her job. You can already picture yourself being unprepared for next year’s course because of your unmotivated teacher. Does this situation sound familiar? I’m sure we’ve all had one or two teachers that popped into our mind. The thing is, what can we do about it?

Allow me to remind you of a familiar experience to many in classrooms today: As the experienced, loved teacher greets his class, he is required to issue a special Common Core workbook. This workbook is filled with questions of a caliber that he and his colleagues, three PhDs and one master’s degree among them, could not fathom. Having to teach the content in this new curriculum is a burden on the teacher. Struggling to understand the content is death to the student.