By: Michaela Gonzalez, Staff Writer

Many of us vividly recall the first day of finals week last Fall when the day-long power outage canceled an entire school day at the last minute. Many of us had crammed a semester’s worth of curriculum late into the night, only to be frustrated that finals were canceled for the day. 

Admination’s answer to this dilemma, via email and phone dialer, was to reschedule the missed Finals for later in the week. This meant students would have three finals a day instead of the traditional two. This caused understandable unhappiness and vexation with many of the students, who feared that having three finals a day would be overwhelmingly stressful and not allow them to perform at their best. Consequently, many students took to social media to vent their frustrations, particularly Instagram. 

Students constantly traveled to the Mills Leadership Instagram (@mhsvikings) account as events unfolded during the day. Leadership had used their Instagram account throughout the school year to post updates on activities, events, and even uplifting and inspirational messages. Their Instagram account was a natural place for Mills students to go, especially during the Finals Fall week.  Leadership had a routine of posting daily countdowns up until finals to inspire the Mills students during this difficult week.

When the power outage occurred on Wednesday, Leadership’s account posted the newly updated final schedule the administration released out of courtesy of updating students who are not up to date with their emails. A repercussion of this post resulted with people spamming the comment section with judgements full of hate and anger.

Initially, when Ms.Dove and the Leadership team received the comments they were, “…annoyed and frustrated”, Ms.Dove recalls. “… a lot of it was appointed to the wrong person, as the Leadership team has no voice in what the administration decides. We were simply completing their position, updating the students.” 

Frustrated at the hurtful comments being made, they turned the comments off. They were particularly urged to do this after an individual published a post on Instagram announcing to implement self-harm. To add on, other students claimed the administration was silencing their voices. They claimed that students would be the victims of this change, but were not consulted in the making. The last straw for the team was when an individual posted to send danger against Mills High School. Upon receiving this, Admin and Leadership attempted to search for this individual. 

Situations similar to this are great examples of how young generations utilize modern technology, for better or worse.

New age technology allows many teens to have the easiest access to phones- and social media, ever. In a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2018, 95% of teens between the ages of 13-17 have a smartphone, and 45% have confessed to being online almost constantly. As for social media, more than half of the surveyed students stated that they have Instagram downloaded on their phone. 

With reasonable argument, Instagram has it’s up and down sides. The benefits of this app is the freedom to create and post whatever and however you may like. Unfortunately, this perk also falls into the category of disadvantages. With this freedom, users can take action too quickly, and let their emotions take control. Especially people with developing brains (yes, us teens), we are proved to be more daring when the consequences of our actions are more unknown than younger children and adults. When we post stories or comments on social media, we are behind a mask:our screens. With this, we are scientifically more likely to publish things without discretion, not knowing the consequences, feeling protected as it is not face-to-face contact.

One aspect we can all agree on: finals week sucks and will always suck. That schedule made none of our lives easier, students and teachers and teachers alike. But whenever we see it in ourselves to post on social media, there is a human behind every screen. And all humanity needs right now is human kindness.