Opinion
THE eagle’s Eye
Page 9 | Oct. 10, 2023
Scheduling headaches for students Overworked counslers need online solution for students Brandon wicken StAFF WRITER
Almost every student at Akins has endured the experience of being scheduled into the wrong class. This is unfortunately an all-too-common and maddening experience. I personally had the maddening experience of being stuck in a college preparatory math class for about a month despite having passed the Texas Success Initiative test during my junior year. Now that I have been rescheduled for the pre-calculous class that I wanted to take, I have been forced to make up an entire month’s worth of lessons that I missed during this scheduling mess. This is not meant to be a slight to our hardworking counselors, but I do have a few suggestions that I think could help alleviate these types of problems. One of the largest issues every year is that students can spend weeks waiting for times when their counselors are available to adjust their schedules. Even without my specific circumstances, most appointments can often take over half an hour per student. This means students who go to their counselor’s offices during class often waste their own time and their teachers’ class time waiting in queues outside of the office. Ideally, there would be time for counselors to catch these kinds of simple scheduling problems before the school year
Cruz Burrows
begins. However, we know that is not the case so there needs to be a better system to meet with counselors to quickly address these problems to avoid having students placed in the wrong classes for long periods of time. Our counselors need all of the support and resources possible to help reduce the number of students who fall through the cracks because of the difficult systems they are forced to use to do their jobs. That’s why, in addition to more double-checking for accuracy I believe the school should have an online appointment scheduling platform where students can see counselor’s aviailability and pick times to visit their or other available counselors, helping both the students and counsel-
ors organize rescheduling on a single online platform. This change would help counselors across academies to organize their appointments with students on a connected platform and could reduce the number of emails from students seeking appointments, improving the counselors’ response times for students emailing about info or other concerns. The final improvement I would like to see is more on the Austin Independent School District’s (AISD) side, updating the unresponsive and outdated user interface of the TEAMS program used for attendance and scheduling. As I’m sure all students and teachers can attest to, TEAMS, created by Frontline Education and used by multiple Texas school districts, is an unstable and often volatile software whose servers crash during high-use periods, like when students and teachers scramble to check and update grades at the end of a grading period. Even when it is working, the user interface of the site leaves much to be desired and can partially be blamed for the amount of class misplacements. A counselor I’ve spoken to has even told me that the site is slow and difficult to navigate, which could be responsible for the long nature of visits that could stand to be improved. If these changes to the appointment and scheduling platforms students use — along with additional resources for counselors — students’ time spent with counselors altering schedules could stand to be greatly reduced.
Unhealthy beauty standards hurt students Highly edited social media posts lead to negative self images Janelle Ponti StAFF WRITER Throughout the years, women have always faced a problem, the beauty standards the world makes us believe will make us “beautiful.” In the 1800s they had clear pale skin, pink rosy cheeks, and a tiny waist with wide hips. In the 50’s they had the hourglass figure and a big bust with bright red lipstick and big dresses with petticoats. In the 2000s they had tanned bodies, shimmering makeup, and layering clothing. Now in 2023, we are open to more body types and clothing styles such as gothic, coquette, y2k and so much more.
But still, some women feel obligated to “look pretty”, they feel like they need these clothes and makeup to feel pretty. Our society has let the fashion industry and so-called influencers dictate these beauty standards — all in the name of selling products to make money. They see a bunch of other women wearing this type of clothing and makeup and think that they need to do the same to look pretty. Nowadays the most significant way beauty standards come about is social media. With social media people can edit their images to appear skinnier, tanner, or younger and many teens will look at these alterd pictures and compare them with their own self image. But women aren’t the only ones that
experience these beauty standards, men can too. They might feel like they need to have six-pack abs and big muscles so that women like or notice them. Again this can lead to severe mental health issues. When you compare yourself to other people, that is a big sign of low self-esteem, but it might lead to problems such as depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and even
Adrian Orduna
suicidal thoughts. Some can argue that makeup is bad for young teens. Some people think wearing too much makeup at a young age can lead them to feel insecure about themselves and feel like they can’t leave the house without a full face of makeup. But others say that makeup is a great way to express yourself. It helps
them feel more confident. I believe that makeup is a beautiful way to express yourself and it’s OK to use it if it makes you feel happy and not just make yourself “prettier” or conform to beauthy standards. The same is true with men and bodybuilding, if you’re doing it to make yourself more ‘attractive’ you should probably stop what you doing because doing so much of something like working out can stress/wear you out and can lead to further problems such as more of a risk of injuries, muscle strain, and so much more. I believe that if you want to make yourself look “prettier” or more attractive, you’re probably doing it for the wrong reasons. But if you are doing it to help your confidence, then be my guest.
