By Benjy Berkowitz ’18, Staff Writer

A day is full of uncertainties. Whether it is, “is this math test going to be hard?” or “is society just a big cube confining me?”, we have so many questions and hesitations in our daily lives. But one thing that remains constant for us, as the students of Newark Academy, is our schedule. We come into morning meeting at 8:10 and leave last period at 2:25- or so we think.
The truth is that, even our schedule is far from certain. I started to notice this a few weeks into this school year. I would look at my watch to see the numbers ticking away to 25 past the hour but at 25 there was no bell. At first the bell was only 5 seconds later and that’s no big deal. I have 5 seconds to spare in my day, maybe even 10, 12 seconds if we’re getting crazy.. After noticing this I started paying a lot more attention to my watch, almost more than the actual classes, but I knew if I wanted to be a whistle-blower I was going to need to make some sacrifices.
The days passed and the seconds grew. As of now, classes end at 25 minutes and 23ish seconds past the hour (by the time this is published, it will have grown even more).
23 little Mississippi’s, no big deal – or is it? You think you get home at 3, half an hour after school ends, but no. You’re actually getting home half an hour and 23 seconds after school ends.
But hey, not all of us are busy, so I bet some of you are thinking I have 23 seconds to spare. And you may be right. I don’t know you. But where does this stop? The seconds have only been adding up; there have been no signs of this trend stopping. By the end of the year, what time will school be ending? 2:30, 2:35 or even 2:45! This has to stop if we want to retain any amount of consistency in our daily schedules.
I know what you’re thinking: “this is in the humor section, it can’t be true.” Well have you ever heard the saying, ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ by Steve Buscemi? That’s what I thought. This isn’t just a paranoid whistle-blower trying to find some ‘gotcha’ journalism, this is our reality. Or my watch might just be a little fast, but I doubt it.