Plenty of Work, Plenty of Play

At Exeter, we toil away for hours at our homework, spend hours each day playing sports, complete work for clubs and somehow fit a social life into the remaining time. Considering our busy schedules, it is no wonder Exonians lose time to browse magazines, read books for fun or take part in interesting, educational activities, but while some claim that we are becoming any less intellectual, we are really just highschoolers.When I was in middle school, after completing homework by 8 p.m., I would watch some TV, have a snack and then head up to my room to read for an hour. I would delve into topics ranging from economics to comical memoirs and mediums from magazines to books, but it was always a pleasing, relaxing way of heading to bed. Flip to now, when I scramble to finish work by 11, scroll through my phone for 10 minutes and then catch barely seven hours of sleep. Indeed, Exeter life is very different than my middle school years. Only occasionally can I fit in a good chunk of time to read on my own, but that does not mean I have suddenly lost the love of learning. We are at high school and naturally we have much more going on in our lives; there is simply not enough time in the day to fit in all of our activities. We act like we have so much work, but that is because we do. This is true for me at Exeter, and also true for my friends back in Washington, D.C. It is not because we attend Exeter that we cannot enjoy books for as long as we used to, it is because we attend high school.Of course, there are some students that cannot give up the love for reading. I know some people at Exeter who will sacrifice needed hours of sleep to read half a book, and I am also friends with kids at home that do the same. Although it is difficult, it is still possible to take pleasure in books during our years at Exeter. Even if we have more work than other schools, which does not seem true, that should not let us complain about becoming less intellectual, because if you truly want to, anyone can fit a couple hours of reading into their schedule.Even if we are learning less on our own, Exonians still attain a vast amount of knowledge by preparing and studying for classes day in and day out. Reading 40 lines of Virgil, a short story about the Vietnam War, an article on magnetism and 20 pages dealing with American Exceptionalism is quite a bit of browsing. Whether it is a usual night of homework or personal reading, we gain the same amount of understanding from it. Occasionally, required reading is not quite of the reader’s interest, but teachers do not try to hand out boring assignments. If other schools do not provide the most engrossing readings, then it is up to the student to find texts that interest them. But most of the time the lessons are filled with valuable, fascinating details that are fun for the student to peruse, if the passages are tedious, it is still in the Exonian’s interest to study the text anyway. After all, even if you may be struggling with The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks or The Sound and the Fury, all books instructors assign are an aspect of this world worth considering, and they only add to one’s intellectual awareness.