As the stench of alcohol surrounded me, I imagined sitting in a ship full of drunken pirates. I looked around in my classes on the first day of school and saw seniors with disheveled clothes, messy hair, and baggy eyes. Exhaustion from the last night of summer could have been an explanation, but the truth was swimming in the foul odor that clung to their breaths: the smell of alcohol.

There are many reasons why you shouldn’t come to class intoxicated, one being that it’s a complete waste of time and energy. The material covered in class will not be absorbed by students if their blood has already absorbed enough alcohol to make them belch and sway in their chairs. Why squander time in class, not being able to understand anything, only to go home feeling terrible and having to teach yourself whatever you missed? It’s not like being inebriated makes the class any better. A drunken student still has to sit in their chair and listen to a teacher talk at them, just like a sober student. At least the sober one can be paying attention and taking notes (or skillfully texting under the table). The inebriated one has nothing to do but be restless, bored, and probably a little confused.

Another reason to avoid the bottle while on campus is that it makes you look trashy to teachers. Something every student who comes to class drunk should know is that it is completely obvious to teachers. You look terrible, and you smell disgusting. Teachers and other students can tell. When students come to class drunk “it’s either very annoying or very funny to the students around them,” senior Laney Eddington said. Losing the respect of teachers who could someday help you with a college application or a small grade boost is not worth coming to class drunk after a rally or lunch. One shouldn’t come to school drunk on the first day, half way through the year, or ever.

One would think that in a high school where emotions and hormones run high that members of opposite sexes would want to impress each other with their looks and smarts. But when students come to class so drunk that their eyes can barely stay open, they look ridiculous. Students can’t impress others with their looks and intelligence when they are sloppy and can barely form sentences without sloshing words and their aroma smells like Barney from “The Simpsons.”

Do whatever you want on the weekends. That time is yours. But when I have to share my time with obnoxiously hammered hooligans, in a small room that doesn’t get enough ventilation, I have to ask that you please don’t come to class hammered. I want to be able discuss the different characters in the novel we are reading in English or explore why light refracts the way it does in physics. “Being drunk at school is like doing homework at a party,” junior Saam Maroofi said. “There is a time and place for everything, school is not the time nor the place. And also you’re just making a fool of yourself.”