Opinion Essay Examples & Writing Samples

The pandemic sent millions of office workers to desks in their kitchens and spare rooms, and many of them never went back full-time. Employers are now deciding whether that was a temporary fix or a permanent option, and some managers want everyone back at a desk they can see. In my view, companies should let employees work remotely for at least part of every week, because the arrangement gives people hours of their lives back and protects the concentration that serious work requires.

The clearest benefit is time. A worker with a forty-minute commute each way spends more than six hours a week traveling, close to a full working day. That time does not vanish when the commute goes away; it goes into sleep, exercise, family meals, and the errands that would otherwise eat into the evening. Employees who are less rushed and better rested arrive at work in better condition.

Remote work also protects the kind of attention that difficult tasks demand. Open-plan offices are noisy and interruptions are constant: a colleague leans over the desk, a meeting overruns, a conversation two seats away breaks a line of thinking. At home, a writer or an analyst can close a door and work through a problem without stopping every ten minutes. Many people find they finish the same amount of work in fewer hours once nobody interrupts them.

Critics argue that remote teams lose the informal contact that builds trust and produces ideas, and that concern is fair. Working alone every day can be isolating, and new employees in particular learn a great deal by overhearing how experienced colleagues handle problems. But this is an argument for a hybrid schedule, not for a full return to the office. Two or three shared days a week give a team the meetings, training, and casual conversation it needs, while the remaining days protect the quiet that individual work requires.

Remote work is not right for every job, and nobody should pretend a warehouse or a hospital ward can run from a laptop. For office work, though, the record of the past few years is difficult to argue with: people can do the job well from home, and they gain hours of their lives back in the process. Employers who insist on five days at a desk are choosing habit over results.

Every spring, millions of students sit down with a pencil and a booklet of multiple-choice questions that will help decide where they go to college. Supporters of these exams say they give admissions officers one fair measure that works across every high school in the country. That argument sounds reasonable until you look at who actually scores well. Standardized tests should play a much smaller part in college admissions, because they measure preparation and privilege more closely than they measure ability.

Test scores track family income. Students whose parents can pay for private tutoring, practice courses, and repeated attempts arrive at the exam with an advantage that has nothing to do with how well they think. A student working twenty hours a week to help with rent takes the same test cold. When two students of equal talent produce different scores because one could afford to rehearse, the number is not measuring talent.

Beyond the question of fairness, there is the question of what the tests actually predict. Research on admissions has repeatedly found that four years of high school grades forecast college performance better than a single morning’s score does. Grades reflect persistence, homework, revision, and the ability to recover from a bad week: the habits college actually demands. A test score reflects one sitting.

The strongest case against heavy reliance on testing, though, is what it does to schools. When admissions depend on an exam, teaching bends toward the exam. Class time goes to question formats and timing strategies instead of long essays, laboratory work, and projects that take a month to finish. Students learn to recognize the shape of a correct answer rather than to build an argument or design an experiment.

None of this means the tests should vanish. A score can still add useful information about a student from an unfamiliar school, and plenty of students are helped by a strong result. But it belongs alongside grades, writing, recommendations, and what a student has actually done, rather than acting as the gate that decides everything else. Admissions offices that made testing optional did not lower their standards; they started looking at more of the student.

Ask a teenager how much time they spend on social media and the honest answer is usually longer than they think. The apps are built that way: every scroll refreshes, every notification pulls a person back, and the feed never ends. Adults tend to respond with lectures about screen time, which teenagers rightly ignore. Teenagers should set firm daily limits on social media themselves, because the alternative is letting a handful of companies decide how their attention, their sleep, and their sense of themselves get spent.

Start with sleep, because everything else depends on it. A phone on the pillow turns a ten-minute check into an hour, and a teenager who falls asleep at one in the morning cannot concentrate in a nine o’clock class. Sleep researchers have warned for years that light and stimulation late at night push the body’s clock later. Nobody chooses to be exhausted, and yet millions of students choose the behavior that guarantees it.

Then there is what the feed does to how young people see themselves. Social media does not show ordinary life; it shows the edited, filtered, best-of version of other people’s lives, and comparing an unedited Tuesday with somebody else’s highlight reel is a losing game every single time. Is it any wonder that so many teenagers report feeling worse about their bodies and their friendships after an evening of scrolling? The app has not lied to anyone. It has simply shown a hundred carefully chosen images and left the viewer to draw the obvious, painful, and false conclusion.

Limits also give something back, and that is the part that gets forgotten. An hour reclaimed from scrolling is an hour available for a sport, an instrument, a job, or a friend in the same room. Teenagers who cut their use report reading more and talking more, and the discomfort of the first week fades quickly. The habit is strong, but it is only a habit.

Social media is not going away, and pretending otherwise is useless. What teenagers can control is the boundary: a set number of minutes a day, no phone in the bedroom overnight, notifications off during school. Those three rules cost nothing, and they hand hours of a young life back to the person actually living it.

Walk out of almost any high school at three o’clock and count the fried chicken places, burger joints, and pizza windows within a five-minute walk. In many towns the number is high, and it is not an accident: these shops cluster where hungry children with pocket money come out of the gates. Local governments should restrict fast food advertising and new fast food outlets near schools, because children cannot reasonably be expected to resist a market that has been built around them.

The evidence that such restrictions work is now fairly strong. After London limited junk food advertising across its buses, trains, and stations in 2019, researchers tracking household shopping found that families bought noticeably fewer high-calorie products in the months that followed. The change came from removing the prompt, not from lecturing anyone. Several local councils in England that blocked new fast food shops within a set distance of schools have reported early signs of the same effect.

Evidence about children’s decision-making points the same way. Studies of advertising and young people consistently find that children under about twelve struggle to recognize persuasive intent: they see a cartoon and a free toy, not a sales pitch. Older teenagers recognize the pitch but are still strongly influenced by price, convenience, and what their friends are eating. Treating a fourteen-year-old with five dollars in their pocket as a fully informed consumer ignores what is known about how choices get made at that age.

Opponents maintain that these rules punish small business owners and treat families as though they cannot think for themselves. That objection deserves a serious answer. Restrictions on advertising and on new outlets near schools do not close existing shops, ban any food, or fine any parent; they change where and how aggressively products are marketed to children. Speed limits outside schools work the same way, and nobody argues that they insult drivers.

Children’s diets are shaped by what surrounds them, and right now what surrounds many schools is a wall of cheap, heavily advertised food. The drop in high-calorie purchases after London’s advertising rules, the early results from councils near schools, and the research on how children read advertising all point in one direction. Restricting fast food advertising and new outlets near schools is a modest, well-evidenced step that protects children where they are least able to protect themselves.

When my district announced it was thinking about a four-day school week, my whole class cheered. Three-day weekends, every weekend, forever. I cheered too, until my mom pointed out that she works Fridays and so does my dad, and asked who exactly was going to be home with my little brother. A four-day school week sounds like a gift to students, but I think it hands families a problem the district does not have to solve.

The first thing nobody mentions is that the four remaining days get longer. Our district’s plan added ninety minutes to each one, which would put me on the bus at six thirty in the morning and back home after five. Anyone who has sat through seventh period on a Thursday knows what an eighth period would be like. I am not learning anything at four in the afternoon; I am waiting for the bell.

Then there is the fifth day itself. For students whose parents work from home, or who have a grandparent nearby, Friday is genuinely free time. For my brother, and for a lot of kids at my school, it means a day alone with a phone, or a day at a program my family would have to find the money for. School is not only teaching. It is meals, supervision, and somewhere warm to be, and cutting a day cuts all of that too.

I understand why districts consider it. Ours is short of teachers, and a four-day week is popular with the teachers we still have. Nobody wants to lose them. But the reason the plan exists is a hiring and budget problem, and students end up carrying the cost of a fix aimed at something else.

If my district wants to keep its teachers, I would rather it paid them properly and rebuilt the schedule than took a day away from us. A three-day weekend would be great for about a month. After that I would be tired, my brother would be bored and alone, and we would still be short of teachers.