By Jake Butler

“Bless you.”

“Excuse me.”

“Is there a tissue around here?”

When the seasons begin to change and the leaves on the trees turn from green to orange, these expressions are all too commonplace in high school classrooms. The time between the start of October and the middle of November, what’s commonly referred to as “Flu Season,” is in full swing and impacting just about everyone at Walled Lake Central.

“You just have to wash your hands and take care of yourself,” said senior David Simon. “I try and do the best I can to try and stay healthy.”

Yet when all else fails and a student finds themselves coming down with an illness, feeling under the weather isn’t the only issue that comes with being sick. With each day that is spent at home biding time until a lower temperature and clearer sinuses arrive, more and more homework is piled on top of a student.

Aside from the worksheets and bookwork assignments, however, are pages of in-class notes and invaluable lectures from teachers that students miss. The labs in their science classes that can’t be recreated; the social studies in-class discussions that can’t be added to an “absent folder”; the band, orchestra, or vocal music practices that can’t just be turned in a day late.

Taking a day off from school (which often turns into two or three), can severely hurt a student’s academic success.

Yet often times, students have no choice but stay home and think to themselves “I’d be in biology right now…” “Yep, I’d be getting out of lunch in five minutes.”

Senior Adam Woldanksi is one student who hates to miss school. But sometimes, he agrees, you just can’t go. “Sometimes you have to just stay home or other people will get sick. [The part that I don’t like is that] you have to make up all the work you missed in a small space of time,” Woldanski said.

We’ve still got a little over a month to go before this dreaded time of year passes us by. But in the meantime, washing hands, eating healthy, staying hydrated, and covering your mouth when you sneeze or cough can all contribute to stopping the spread of illnesses, whether it be the common cold or a version of the flu. By the time that Thanksgiving break rolls around, however, “Flu Season” will officially be “Out of season.”