In this day in age, all you can see when you walk outside are people with their hands glued to their phones, teenagers spending all night watching Netflix instead of working on their homework, and kids bumping into every person in the grocery store because they’re too busy playing Pokémon to see where they’re going. While doing any of that outside of school in a way that doesn’t affect your classes in any way is perfectly fine, it can interfere with your success during the school day, and that isn’t acceptable.

Everyone knows that there are some people that are frequent offenders of using their cell phones during class. In addition to the fact that they are blatantly going against the rules the school has in place, they are putting themselves in a situation where they are more easily missing information their teachers give them during class. It’s so easily avoidable by simply putting their phone away and paying attention. No one is going to miss that much if they don’t see a tweet as soon as it’s posted or if they don’t respond to a text from their mom until lunch.

And every day, there’s that one kid that goes up to everyone and says, “Man, I pulled an all-nighter last night watching Netflix.” And that one kid goes the entire day not really paying attention to anything their teachers say and not really doing any of his work to the best of his ability, because he is just so exhausted. Everyone deserves to go home after school and sit down to treat themselves with a couple episodes of the newest season of Orange is the New Black or watching their favorite movie, but it compromises their success at school the next day if they get little to no sleep. As hard as it is to wait to watch the rest of a show, watching it all on a school night is not the way to go.

It’s understandable to want to enjoy yourself and to do whatever you want to do, whether it be spending all of your free time playing video games or type, type, typing away on your phone, but it should be everyone’s top priority to do the best they can in school. Just close up shop at night early to get enough sleep for the next day, and stay off your phone during class. It isn’t that hard.

This world is overrun with technology, and it’s slowly ruining every students’ grades, because they are such a distraction to them. It is possible to do your best to avoid that though, by planning accordingly to not allow it to affect how well you do in school.