So it’s about that time of year where the weather fluctuates and everybody starts to feel like they have the plague.
When thousands of young adults live in close quarters of each other, it can be really easy to get sick, and it only takes one person sneezing in class to infect almost the whole campus.
Before you think I’m going to start telling people to drink only orange juice and start wearing sanitary masks, keep reading.
Being sick while you’re in school is probably one of the worst feelings in the entire world. Not only do you feel like crap, but deciding whether to go to class is generally a lose-lose situation.
If you decide not to go to class until you feel well enough to get back, then you’re probably missing multiple classes and all your late work is probably going to pile up because you won’t want to do your work if you feel like you’re about to pass out.
Then once you feel better, you need to play catch up with all of the homework you missed for multiple classes, possibly for multiple days, while making sure you do the work that you’re being assigned now.
On the other hand, if you decide that it’s not worth missing that many classes and decide to just suck it up, it will take a while longer for you to get better because you’re not resting – unless you’re sleeping in class – and you will most likely infect everyone else in the classroom.
Then there’s a likely chance that once you do get over your illness, you’ll catch it again.
So what is there to do? It seems that most college students opt to just go to class and make the university sick for a month because they care more about their grades than their health, but is that the best decision?
Having a low immune system can cause a lot of negative effects on studying, homework and class presence. A lot of people won’t be very alert. Depending on how sick they are, some fall asleep in class and it may just be more difficult to study if you have to cough and sneeze every three minutes.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t go to class if you have a small headache or your nose is a bit runny, but you’re only hurting yourself, and everybody else if you just show up to class with whooping cough.
However, I do understand what it is like to miss one day of classes and fall behind for the next month. So here is my proposition.
Given that a student is legitimately sick and doesn’t just have a sore elbow, I think that teachers should be a bit more lenient when it comes to students who have to miss class. This way, students can actually feel like it’s OK to nurse themselves back to health and not infect everybody around them.
Not to mention, most of the time, more quality will appear in homework if a student is healthy and takes time to get it done, as opposed to trying to read while doped up on cough syrup or trying to finish it because it’s due tomorrow and if you don’t get it done now you’ll be behind until Thanksgiving break.
KHADIJA DJELLOULI
