Witty humor to expose people’s stupidity and vices, submitted by AP Lit students.

by Steven Palmer ’13
AP Lit Student 

Recently, the Montgomery County Public School system has agreed to form a committee to study the possibility of moving high school start times to no earlier than 8:15am. This move comes after Superintendent Starr was given a petition of over 10,000 signatures in support of the change in start times. While many families support the change, there is a strong opposition that says lowering start times is much too impractical.

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Dear MCPS Leaders Who Are Against Making School Start Later,

First of all, thank you. You are the extraordinary minds that knock aside the over-caring parents and the whiney students. You are the revolutionaries who know that an attempt to make high school start later is even more ridiculous and far-fetched than efforts to put healthy food in the cafeterias, or to get bad teachers fired.

You are the real thinkers. You think with your mind, not with some cockamamie crap called “science.” I bring up this important and impressive trait of yours because the first thing these crybabies say is, “Science says that giving kids one more hour of sleep can increase their SAT scores, better their moods, and improve attendance!” What a ridiculous statement. They think just because it’s been tested and replicated thousands of times across the country, with the results constantly proving the exact same point, it’s like, a fact or something. It’s not a fact, it’s just science, and why should we start listening to science? We’ve never done it in the past!

We saw that science was trying to mess with our lives dozens of times before. There was “global warming,” AKA a completely normal and astoundingly fast rise in the earth’s temperature. There was evolution, AKA a funny fairy tale about how somehow people grew out of a lizard, or something. There have even been studies that were pro-preventative healthcare, which was science telling us that it is good to see a doctor more in order to get sick less. Why would you want to see a doctor more if you want to be less sick? Doctors are for when you are sick, so seeing one even more just means you’re getting sick more often. All of these so-called “scientific facts” are just myths that the propaganda machine of science tells us are true. I don’t know why, maybe it’s just to mess with our heads. Luckily for America though, we have never let science’s lies permeate our skulls, which are thick enough to keep even the most outlandish of “facts” out, like the myth of gravity. We know that if we were to allow school to start later, and therefore cave in to science and its bullshit, we would be hypocrites. And we would rather die and help no one than admit we’re wrong and help someone, especially if that someone was science, am I right?

You are the strong, the focused, the Americans. You understand that these cries to delay the bell are really just the whines of teenagers begging to be able to hit Snooze one more time. I know that it can be hard, especially when these obnoxious teenagers don’t listen to our advice. We tell them, “Just go to bed earlier!” But they don’t listen. Instead, they say things like, “Psychologists everywhere agree that a teenager’s circadian rhythms are greatly delayed, which makes it impossible for them to fall asleep until at least an hour or two after most adults.” Psychologists? Circadian rhythms? Sounds like more scientific propaganda if you ask me. Circadian rhythms are clearly just a fancy way of saying “my bed feels too comfy.” You and I both know that anyone who can’t manually override his “circadian rhythms” is a pussy.

You are the realists. This is your most important trait. These dreamers think that making school start later won’t have any negative repercussions, that all of a sudden, the bell will be ringing later and nothing else will have changed. Well they’re dead wrong aren’t they? If we make school start 45 minutes later, how much later will it end? I don’t know exactly how much time we’d have to add on, since I believe that math is just science’s nerdy younger brother. There’s no limit to how late schools would end, just from starting 45 minutes late. For all we know, school could be ending at 8pm! They say that school would end 45 minutes later, resulting in no time being lost or added on. Well even if I could do the math to figure out if that’s correct, don’t they know what we’re losing by getting home 45 minutes later? We could be using that time to do our homework! And trust me, we need that time, since we were too tired in class to process the information well enough to do our work properly.

Another thing these dreamers didn’t stop to think about was the bus schedules. Right now, buses pick up high school students, then middle school students, and then elementary school students. Making high school start later means making elementary school start later as well, right? They say that we could reverse the schedules, so that elementary school students have the earliest timeslot, and high school kids the latest. Well that is utterly ridiculous as well. If we can’t get high school students up at 5am, what hope is there to get elementary school students up then? Those little kids can be annoying, and I’m sure they’d be even worse after having to wake up at five. I know because recently I spent the weekend at a relative’s house, and this relative has two adorable seven year-olds. And those bastards woke me up every morning at 5am by screaming and jumping on my bed! Why can’t everyone else understand that no one wants to deal with little kids that early? We should be asking ourselves where we could send them when they wake up at 5am…?

The point I’m trying to make here is to keep doing what you’re doing. Keep saying “Screw Sleep!” and rubbing your eyes proudly in the direction of those wimps who want school to start later. They don’t understand the realities of what they want, just like losers like “Dr.” Martin Luther King Jr., who dreamed of a place with equal rights. He did nothing but dream, which, by the way, means he probably spent a lot of time sleeping. He didn’t understand all of the technical difficulties of his dream. Neither did Jesus, who preached peace and happiness for everyone. Yeah, like that could happen. Both of those guys were killed, so clearly we are on the right path by doing the opposite. Thank you for not dreaming of solutions to problems, but simply focusing hard enough on them until they hopefully go away.

Love,

A Proud to Be Sleepy

Steven Palmer