Dear, Mr. principle,

Recently, my friends have been telling me that my time giving to the community is taking away from things that they want to do with me, for example: yesterday, my friend OTHER_NAME wanted to go to the movies, he called me on my cell phone and i answered, but had to reject because of the preoccupation with typing blankets for a homeless shelter. altogether, i myself am beginning to fell i am taking to much time away from myself to do anything i wanted to do. in the example i gave you, OTHER_NAME was going to see a movie i wanted to see for a while now, but, not being able to just drop my responsibility to the community service, i had to refuse, and continue on with my work. I would like to have more time to fun things, like see movies, play video games, or go to the park, i have already found myself signing my self up for another full week of service, and worse yet i made a promise i would go see that movie with OTHER_NAME! so i think that, as helpful as it is, it is very time consuming.

My way of thinking is this, if you want to go and serve the community, that good, and it builds character, but it can also lead to some nasty clashes with your wanting to help, and your personal time, where you want to just do what YOU want, not what a bunch of people tell you to do. Community service is a very nice thing to do, but on more than one occasion, i have had to bail out on a friend because i had planned to help my youth group, or i would have wanted to go and play of the park, but i had something getting in the way, if its not community service getting in the way of friends, its friends getting in the way of community service. My point is that in the process of helping people, your also angering, frustrating, and disappointing a whole lot more i. e friends or the people who asked you to help in his particular project, which can cause either a lot of stress, or even anger towards them, for being mad at you for wanting to do what you want, although not at all times, similarly to when my friend OTHER_NAME bought a R.C. airplane, and was flying it at the park, but i was busy cleaning out some old apartment. Out of all the things in the world i would be doing instead of flying my friend plane, was to be cleaning out and apartment. so, even now i have begun again with starting to do nothing but community service, and all the while angering and frustrating my friends.

I know that making community service a mandatory act, would cause uproar from the students, not only that, but it would be wrong, when i get home, i want to just stay there, or go do something with my friends, however, if you out every student at the school in my shoes, that copious amount of community service would anger all the students and just make them not want to do it that much more, what im getting at is the fact that if you want to do it, do it! by all means, but if you don't want to, then don't, and have the other people that want to do it, community service should be a choice, not a requirement, that would only make community service be all that less popular among students, and the fact that making it mandatory would cause every student to go home and tell their parents how they had to do extra work.