The first year of everyone in SMSD having a MacBook was a rough one, to say the least. The majority of teachers found it immensely frustrating to have to fight the laptops every single class period. Students would be playing games, iMessaging each other, or just browsing the internet instead of paying attention to what the teacher was saying. This made it very hard for most of the teachers to put the laptops to good use because they couldn’t trust their students to have them out and focus at the same time.

On the other hand, the students loved them. Not only did the laptops let us play games when we were bored but they were a faster way to take notes, we didn’t have to worry about printing anything off, it was much easier to contact teachers, and overall, they just helped make everything easier. All year I took care of my laptop because I was well aware that if anything bad happened to it, my parents would pay the price. It was spotless; I had never dropped it, and I had never downloaded anything bad. At the end of the year I handed it back to the school assuming I would get it back the next year.

On the second day of school I went with my English class to the gym where the laptops were being handed out. I gave the parent volunteer my name and she handed me what I assumed to be the laptop and charger that I had possessed the previous year. However, I was wrong in assuming that.

Disgusting does not even begin to describe the state my laptop and charger were in. There were crumbs in the keyboard, water spots all over the screen, and dirt caked in the oddest places. I couldn’t even begin to understand what the previous owner had done with this laptop to make it look the way it did. I’m no germaphobe, but I could not touch the laptop until I had a Clorox wipe in my hand. I cleaned it as well as I could, but there are still parts of the laptop that I couldn’t get to and are quite icky. This isn’t a good thing because we need the laptops to last us for a long time because they are very expensive. It isn’t pleasant to use a gross laptop all year, especially considering how often we use our laptops in class.

 It shouldn’t be okay for people to treat their laptops as badly as they do. In my opinion, the MacBook that students receive when they walk in to SMW freshman year should be the laptop that they give back at the end of their senior year. If a student wants to treat their laptop badly, they can deal with it throughout their whole high school career and then when they graduate, they can pay for the damages. Every year on the day that we all turn in our laptops, we should have to wipe them down with a Clorox wipe, so we are staying clean and the laptops never get too disgusting. Shawnee Mission School District paid way too much money on these laptops for us to treat them like our own personal property.