By Siona Kirschner
If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, silent study is a designated room that’s pretty much what it sounds like (you study, silently). As you are probably aware, these are both concepts that are greatly difficult for your average high school student, inspiring me to list a few of the behaviors this difficulty can manifest into.
The (unintentionally) Loud One: The door slams when she walks in, then she forgets to connect her headphones before blasting Superache at full volume (she’s having a day), then she struggles an impressive amount with a crinkly bag of chips before opening it. If we’re being honest, we’ve all been her. Let’s show a little sympathy.
The (intentionally) Loud One: First the silence is just really funny, leading to performative giggling. Then they simply must show their friend the Instagram story of the person they can’t stand. Then their other friend walks in and they have to say hi. No one really understands what exactly brought them to silent study in the first place, since they clearly aren’t silent or studying, but we just have to accept that their intentions were probably better than their actions.
The Annoyed One: Sighs (loudly) when the unintentionally loud one walks in, gets up to tap the intentionally loud one on the shoulder and whisper (loudly) that this is a silent study. This person is probably the loudest one in the room.
The Actually Locked In One: This person is a rare sighting, if we’re being honest. She’s usually wearing headphones, and is just working with an astonishing amount of diligence, making everyone else look absolutely awful.
The Napping One: This person is either a completely unobjectionable presence or they snore. If it’s the latter, you can only hope the annoyed one will harness his powers for good and wake them up to tell them to stop.
The Really Stressed One: Whatever they’re working on was assigned two weeks ago and is due in fifty-seven minutes. They’re typing at an impossible speed, which isn’t helping them at all because they’re clearly making an insane number of typos. You can tell that a significant amount of their brain power is being poorly allocated to planning their life once they run away and start a new life in Scotland/The Swiss Alps/The Circus/a commune. They’ll either end up getting an A or a D; there’s no in between, and they’re painfully aware of this fact as they work.
The Unfocused One: This person very clearly is painfully well-acquainted with the maximum number of tabs you can have on your phone on Safari (not to expose myself, but it was 500, and they actually recently removed the limit!). They swear they would be working, if they could just decide which of their three deeply urgent assignments with fast-approaching due dates to prioritize. Since they can’t, they’re most likely listening to music and scrolling through their impressively curated Pinterest account. They’ll probably transform into the really stressed one in the next 2-10 business days.
The Couple: No one wants them there. They persist. They have the power to turn everyone else in the room into the annoyed one.
The Should-Be-A-Couple: It would be cute and you would be rooting for them, if you didn’t have an AP Chem test next period and a history essay due tomorrow. They think they’re really subtle for writing notes on their math homework pages and stifling their giggles, but they decidedly are the least subtle people you have ever met.
As someone who has been at least four of these people (guess which?), I wanted to end this by saying that we should all look deep within ourselves before we judge them for how annoying they are. They probably have the best of intentions and are just cracking under the pressures of the American school system in their own unique ways.