It's weird looking back on high school and realizing how much of it was ridiculously cruel. You'd have teachers and parents all telling you that it's your fault

It's weird looking back on high school and realizing how much of it was ridiculously cruel. You'd have teachers and parents all telling you that it's your fault for not having better time management skills or executive functioning skills, all the while you're 15; you're still growing mentally and physically; you're sleep deprived as hell; and the work is just piling on, and on and on. Their advice, I kid you not, was to just squeak in work in every possible situation. On the subway? Read your assigned book. In class? Sneak in some homework. And sure, kids procrastinate. But they procrastinate because they want to have leisure and they feel absolutely no control over their lives. Good luck if you did a sport. I remember hearing some elite fencers talk and all of them said essentially "yeah...I didn't get a lot of sleep in high school". That's not some innocuous hard work ethic mindset. That's messing with a developing brain and depriving it of a necessary resource. It pisses me off that we're just realizing that this culture of torturing teenagers is maybe not the best idea.