By Jesús Jiménez
Staff Writer
High school is the ultimate obstacle for teenagers. When students enter through these doors, it is expected they will receive their fair share of drama, friendship and an immense amount of work that will haunt them throughout the next four years.
The latter applies directly to the community of SLA. Behind the amount of conversations you have over the internet and all the projects that were definitely not completed at the last minute, there is someone, or rather something that you owe it all to: your laptop.
We, teenagers, ages thirteen through eighteen, are as reckless as they come and it is not expected that we will suddenly be responsible, capable adults when an electronic device is trusted to them for the remainder of our time here.
Quite of few things can happen: You might tip a soda bottle in the direction of your keyboard, crack a screen after slamming your top-case a little too hard or even drop it on your very first day. While most of these incidents are preventable, the consequences of mistreated laptop are apparent by senior year.
Our laptops look and feel alienated from the rest of the school. To put this into perspective, recall the Pixar’s WALL-E. If you were to compare the aged trash compactor WALL-E to the much more sleek and fast, then you could get a glimpse of how bad they have it.
Senior Breeanna Noi had a good run with her Macbook. It was two months to prior May that the issues started to arise. She accidently spilled lemonade on her laptop during the busiest season of the quarter. “All the times I was forced to work on benchmarks and projects made me want to stay away from my computer,” said Noi.
Nearing the end of her high school career, she only had one comment to make about her computer. “I hate technology.”
Unlike Noi, Senior Alex Johnson had a different approach on laptops in general. “I don’t like Macs,” he admitted. “They have a very short life span. Plus, they’re outdated and have underpowered hardware, too.”
Johnson doesn’t bother bringing his Macbook to school anymore. He leaves it at home and does all his assignments on his own PC.
Very soon, seniors at Science Leadership Academy won’t have to worry about any heart wrenching trips to the Tech Lab, any benchmarks gone terribly wrong or the infamous spinning beach balls of doom.
The final Laptop Turn-In is right around the corner. Regardless of when students are graduating, we can all reminiscence on the first day we got our laptops, excited that we were to be apart of SLA’s culture and community.