As cold and flu season wraps up, there’s a new illness in the air at St. Paul Academy and Summit School, one that is more common than a stomach bug and more contagious than mononucleosis. The major symptoms include disinterest in classes and disrespect for school faculty. The origin is unknown, but the one thing that’s certain is its’ negative effects on the school community.

SPA puts a lot of value on community and discussion based learning, but how does that work when students don’t respect their teachers and other adults in the building? There are many staff members whose names and jobs we don’t know and don’t care enough to find out. Our school could not run the way it does without the hard work of people who most students have never acknowledged. We go to staff members only when we need something, and forget that they, like us, are human beings who might want to be asked how their day is going. Students are too self-involved to realize that making jokes about teachers, on- and off-line, can hurt them the same way they would hurt any of us.

In addition to regular staff, substitute teachers and other temporary staff are rarely taken seriously. When students walk into a class to find someone other than their regular teacher in charge, many assume they won’t be learning anything that day which not only disrespects the teacher, but also puts them behind in their learning.

As for disinterest, many students are becoming less and less attentive to their school work. Despite the fact that our families are spending so much money on our educations, and that we are at school to learn, we brush off assignments, spend class time surfing the internet or talking with friends, and study only in very small amounts in an effort to appear as though we don’t care. At times, students seem to be competing for who can do the least. “I only studied like half an hour for that test,” can be heard followed by, “Really? I didn’t study at all!” People don’t use the library to read, but instead for checking their Facebook and socializing, putting many other things ahead of academic work while in the school building. This front of not caring can negatively impact academic achievement, which is the reason most of us are at SPA in the first place.

So what can we do to cure this highly contagious plague? To start, we need to find what interests us and figure out how to apply it to our classes. Like with most things in life, school is what you make it. Everyone reserves the right to make things interesting for themselves.