Students are facing dire issues: 40 million dollars in budget cuts for their school district, climate change, rising political tension. Only one problem truly strikes them at their core, boredom.

When bored, ingenious students find ways to distract themselves from the actual lesson being taught in class. Whether it’s an endless lecture or insanely long homework packets, if a student is bored, they will find a way to entertain themselves.

Back in our teachers’ day, students passed notes or wouldn’t stop talking. But with modern technology, Gen Z has it easy when it comes to methods for discrete distraction.

The school district, however, keeps fighting back.

Our phones have already been imprisoned, and next year will be even worse with plans for Yondr pouches. Now, in the district’s endless whack-a-mole game trying to eliminate distractions in the classroom, they have set their sights on Chromebooks, utilizing Securly to block websites that host games or other entertainment services like Netflix, Tetris and Quora. 

An anonymous source told us how they’ve been handling blocked websites.

“I first found out when I was going to 2048 because I finished a math assignment, and it was blocked,”  said the source. 

If Securly is a brick wall blocking students from accessing their favorite games, students are finding ways to walk around it. The methods in which they circumvent these restrictions vary in extremity.

Most students have simply found new websites to spend their time on, but our anonymous source was persistent in playing a favorite game.

“Seventh period without 2048 is my worst nightmare. Naturally, I consulted a very reliable source, [Chat GPT], which helped me find a work around, so now I can play 2048 again and keep my highscores,” the source said. 

From these attempts, we can observe the creativity and persistence of students when their precious distractions are threatened. Now it is only a matter of time to see how they will react to the upcoming Yondr pouches.