Extracurricular activities are fun, but are they really a good thing? The principal of Generic_School has made these activities mandatory. Extracurricular activities can be a bad thing, they take away free time that could be spent with family or friends, they could leave students without enough time or energy to do homework, and they are a distraction that takes focus from school.

Extracurricular activities take time away from family and friends. That time taken away from family and friends weakens the bonds that they share with the students, and when it comes to hard times those weakened bonds make them turn their backs on one another. The students would become distant and unsocial because all their time would be invested in the activities instead of with other people. They could even become stressed because they are not spending time with family and friends. This is one reason that the decision to these activities mandatory was slightly hasty.

Extracurricular activities are exhausting and take time to participate in. Therefore these activities leave the students without enough time or energy to do homework. Without the homework that supports their grades, the students grades will slip and tumble from A's and B's all the down to D's and F's. If the students stay up late trying to get the mountain of homework completed they will not get enough sleep and the next day in class they will be tired and unable to pay attention. They will have no idea what is happening in class because the homework they didn't have time to do explained the things that the class went over in more detail. They will need to retake the class, but as long as the activities that they have take time and energy the same outcome will occur.

Extracurricular activities are a distraction that takes focus from schoolwork. The students thoughts would start to wander to what they could introduce into a discussion or what kind of thing that they could ask people in the yearbook and they could miss an entire lecture. Even when they try to listen they can't concentrate enough to remember what was said in the class ten minutes after class ended. The students may even try to cheat because they didn't pay attention in class and went into the test taking area unprepared. All of these things can make a school look bad on many types of forms and reviews.

In conclusion extracurricular activities are not good for some students and making them mandatory was a bad idea. Some students can do several after school activities and still be perfectly fine while others may not be okay with even one. It all depends on what the students are capable of and where their boundaries lie.