Since when has extra credit been given out according to bladder control? Extra credit should be awarded according to hard work and dedication, but some teachers seem to disagree.

Rather than give a worksheet or an additional assignment, many teachers choose to torture students with their own system of bathroom passes. For anyone who has been lucky enough to avoid this system in their years as a student, it works something like this: At the beginning of each quarter or semester, students receive five passes that they are allowed to use when they would like to be excused from class to use the bathroom or retrieve something from their locker.

Because of this system, each student is faced with a difficult and sometimes health-hazardous decision of using a pass to get out of class or staying in class and cashing in these passes for extra credit.

There are some students who constantly ask to “go to the bathroom” and are gone for ten minutes at a time, getting cookies or visiting with a friend. If a student is constantly missing class for this purpose day after day, the teacher should limit that student to the number of times he or she can go to the bathroom instead of forcing the rest of the class to choose between extra credit or a bladder explosion.

I understand that as a teacher, this would get annoying, but it is even more annoying as an over-hydrated student who sincerely has to use the bathroom to be limited to the number of times that he or she can go.

Teachers say that students have the opportunity to use the bathroom between classes, though true in theory, this is completely untrue in practice. Many students carry only one or two subjects with them at a time which results in frequent locker stops and a lack of time to use the bathroom.

Personally speaking, the passing time between fourth and fifth hour is the most stressful time of my day. As soon as my class in the freshman hallway ends, my race against time begins. On my busiest days, I have to fight immense amounts of traffic in the main hallway, ask my Spanish teacher a question, weave through the dungeon-like hallways of the basement, and go to the bathroom; a list of tasks that cannot be easily accomplished in five minutes, and often forces me to relinquish any hope that I can take a bathroom break without receiving a tardy or a snide remark from the teacher.

Teachers should be rewarding the students who stay after class to ask questions, and those who work hard on every assignment. Grades should not be linked to bathroom usage, but to actual work. As a student who is affected by these passes, I would much rather do a worksheet or two for extra credit than sit in class regretting the Caribou that I drank earlier that morning.