We’ve all seen them; those tiny blinking lights staring down at us from little white boxes attached to the ceilings of every center. We’ve sat beneath them, feeling the heat of their laser eyes mocking us for not knowing when they would stop uselessly sticking around on the ceilings and start doing something to somehow help us finish stacks and stacks of PAK work, maybe even help us understand pages and pages of The Odyssey, a story obviously written in a language far from English. Well, the wait is over; it has recently been confirmed that Kerr will be Wi-Fi-ready and up and running with a new school-wide wireless network system by the beginning of the 2014-2015 school year. Of course, to many students that might immediately be taken as fantastic news, news some have been waiting on for years. But it’s easy for anyone’s judgment to get a little cloudy when they’ve been waiting so long for something as big as this. When it comes down to it, having Wi-Fi in school isn’t all fun and games-in fact, fun and games should be the last things on students’ minds when they use it. Having Wi-Fi isn’t a bad thing, but there are definitely some essential things that students should be advised to consider before taking advantage of this potentially invaluable new resource.

First of all, let’s face it: Kerr students are notorious for their susceptibility to an appalling level of procrastination. It’s as if it’s just in our blood. And for some students, it’s so ingrained that throwing in an irresistible temptation like quick and mobile internet access to hours of aimless internet browsing might just be the stainless steel shovel they need to dig themselves even further into the pit of no return. That’s not to say that some of them might be able to find a way to resist the urge, though. If there’s one thing plenty of Kerr kids can do, it’s resist. If the amount of effort many put into resisting PAK work till the last minute could be redirected to resisting the temptation to screw up a wonderful opportunity for the school, then this whole Wi-Fi situation might just work out for the best for all of us.

Assuming we can handle the responsibility and resist the temptation to be counter-productive with it, this Wi-Fi presents a world of fantastic possibilities and opportunities and direct access to invaluable information literally at every student’s fingertips. No more waiting for dusty blue desktops screens and clunky old laptops to “load your personal settings” or having to leave your desk, check out a computer, and then wait for it to load just to look up the word, “anacouluthon.” Instead, we’ve got something faster, closer, and completely familiar: our smartphones, tablets, personal laptops, etc. It just makes sense to make use of the things we use daily at home by making them useful at school too. In this way, instead of sitting around doing nothing for seven hours, they, too, are teaching us alongside our textbooks, PAK work, and teachers.

Again, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with having Wi-Fi in our school, it all just depends on the way that we each choose to use it. It can either go very right, or very wrong. It’s a decision each of us is going to have to make on our own. There’s only so much that administrators can do to stop a student from wasting his or her own time. Any student here can attest that this Wi-Fi is something that our school has wanted for so long; now it’s time to see if it’s something that we deserve.