Fun is subjective. Everyone sees fun a different way. For instance, someone might see fun as throwing a ball back and forth with a friend, while someone else finds fun in instant gratification in online video games. Others, on the contrary, find fun in discovering new and innovative ways of counting prime numbers and memorizing absurd amounts of digits of pi. These people also frequently get the short side of the stick when it comes to decisions majorly accepted as fun. This consists of extracurricular activities such as sports and inter murals. Although this is a particularly opinionated based subject, it is also one worth mentioning. I believe that students should not be obliged to take part in extracurricular activities because students are overwhelmed with considerably more important subjects such as mathematics and English, students have a lack of free time as it is, and most people would rather do extracurricular activities at home rather than at school.

People are overwhelmed during school with other things besides extracurricular activities. For instance, most students find themselves dumbfounded when trying to reflect on what the teacher has said in the past hour of not being able to focus. This is most likely due to sleep deprivation or stress. One plausible explanation to explain why a student might not get enough sleep at night is because he or she spent too much time studying or doing homework when he or she should have been sleeping. This is a problem not only because of the lack of energy during integral class time, but also because it causes stress. When students suddenly realize that there is an upcoming test the next morning or there is a massive project due the very next day that they have not even taken a crack at, stress is typically a resulting factor. Even if the student does get to sleep early, he or she may not be able to fall asleep or stay asleep the whole night because of the stress caused by the assignment or assignments due. This will only get built upon when adding even one mandatory extracurricular activity. This is a crucial problem occurring to students, but when asked, they are not willing to admit it to authority figures or even their parents. Therefore, students should not be obliged to participate in extracurricular activities because they might already be overwhelmed with seemingly more important subjects.

Students do not get enough free time as it is. Hypothetically speaking, after coming home from a long day at school, a student might want to play for a bit before getting started on his or her arduous homework. From a brief look at the clock, the student realizes that there is no time to play and decides to start on his or her homework while he or she still can. Because the homework that was given to he or she was too much to handle, he or she still did not manage to finish his or her homework even though he or she did set aside play time. While this is no anecdote, a lot of real students go through this, myself included. This, along with the additional extracurricular activity that is probable to give even more homework, proves that students are already incapable of completing homework assignments because they do not get enough free time to do so. Therefore, adding the mandatory extracurricular activities will only drag down the amount of free time students have to have fun and play.

I may not be the perfect candidate to speak on everyone's behalf, however, I think that most people would rather do extracurricular activities such as sports at home rather than at school. This is probably because no matter how hard they try, the school never executes their plans correctly. Also, if and when someone does do it at home by his or her self, he or she would normally have a lot more fun and feel a lot more accomplished with the activities because there are no limits when it comes to creativity and imagination. Therefore, I encourage imagination by not wanting to have one or more mandatory extracurricular activity at school because the students will probably not like it if the activities were set up by the school.

To conclude, I do not think that each and every student should participate in at least one extracurricular activity because students grow easily overwhelmed and stressed out over other subjects such as mathematics, students have a lack of free time as it is, and most people who would like to do extracurricular activities would probably like to do them at home by themselves. This is, however, a particularly subjective subject, nonetheless it is worth the mention. I hereby encourage students to be creative and resourceful by doing extracurricular activities as they please!