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agreed: technology
disagree: pressure to have more, be more, do more
mental health is a real issue - worse for most students and not everyone takes it seriously
social media can create competitiveness, hyperawareness of oneself, changes the way social circles are run and organized, two "faces" - public and private, quantifying friendship, perception vs reality

=adjusting the tone to make point and educate not alienate
-interview other people with different perspectives: Mr. Strong (school psychologist), guidance counselors, high school students from different grades, groups, etc, high school teachers, parents?,
-research (statistics)

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High school is still very hard. As one example, if your end goal is to go to a good college, then that has become much more difficult over time.

In the past, it was easier to get accepted to top schools, easier to pay for tuition, and easier to get a job out of college.

Now, students looking to get a well-paying job must go to a top school, which requires incredible effort in high school: AP classes, extracurricular activities, volunteering, and sacrificing your free time just to make a living.

This covers many high school students, but for those going into a trade job or not going to college, there is still almost nothing easier about school today than before.

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I don't think that this is the easiest time to be a high school student. People should not have bias because of the school or current events.

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I think that this is a bit of a bold statement because we are all going through something new and different! In some respects, yes, it is easy because we can use resources as we please.
However, we also aren't get the normal social interaction we're used to, which can be really hard at this point in our lives. It isn't fair to assume that everyone is living the same easy and carefree life just because it is online. It could actually be quite the opposite! Since we do have these tools at our disposal, this makes assignments harder, because the teachers are well aware of what we have at our fingertips. :-)

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I don't think that this is true because modern day high school students are dealing with increased depression and anxiety on top of an out dated school system that only gives us vital information in the years K-4.

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I both agree and disagree with this statement. It's the easiest time to be a high school student because we have the most resources of any class, but it also sucks. Taking from personal experience, this is the worst year for mental health by far. Isolation is horrible and it's a little harder to contact guidance this year compared to other years. I also feel like standards in general have risen, so there's a lot more pressure to be the best since "we have it so easy".

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Being a high school student in this age, you have to deal with more additional pressure. We are responsible for being the saving grace for humanity and being the next leaders and innovators. We also have to deal with an increase in population that has led to additional competition. Various programs have become more rigorous and harder to compete in. The world is growing, but some of it's institution and programs are not. Not to mention, with the additional resources we are given we are made to believe that the work is easier, but in reality we have higher expectations because we are capable of doing more. Everything we do is broadcasted to the world whether we know it or not and everyone knows each other's business. High School students have a lot of additional distractions that can interfere with our education.

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I disagree with this statement because social media is just one factor that has put an exorbitant amount of pressure on young people. Social media creates competition amongst friends on who has the more "post-able" or "liked" life, and this also makes teenagers hyper–self-aware of themselves. I also think that this generation, even with social media, is one of the most isolated generations because its harder to maintain friendships off the internet.

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First of all, "easier" is a subjective term. The claim itself doesn't serve any purpose without any clear paradigm of what it means to be a high school student, and what specific factors it is referring to. But even if there were a better qualifier, it would still homogenize the high school experience into a single one-dimensional narrative. Overall, saying "it's easier to be a high schooler right now" lacks depth on any of the factors that would affect a high school students' ability to thrive in a pandemic learning environment. Simply put, you cannot defend or refute this unless the claim was defined further.

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People that say this  don't have the right to say this because they don't understand how physically and mentally draining adapting to this new environment is and how kids are struggling everyday because our teenage years have been stripped from us. The statement is kind of offensive that these people think we are having everything handed to us on a silver platter when in reality we are getting our education, freedom, experience and so much more taken while they have already lived their teenage lives. Times have changed so obviously it's not going to be the same as it was then they were teens and that makes this circumstance so much harder to understand because they will never get what we are going through.

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There is no way that this is anywhere close to the truth. Pertaining to the hardships and difficulties that ALL high school students have persisted through, we add on the effects of new technology, heightened social strain, and a gosh darn global pandemic. It's unfair to be set at the same standards as someone who attended high school 5 years ago, 10 years ago, or more. Life is different and arguably, no one has done more adjusting to it than us. People think this way because they find safe technology to be a fallacy onto older students as more resources are available to us to help, yet this is also, objectively speaking, a difficulty. New technology is more difficult than ever to adapt to and there are always things we don't know; adults love to mock teens saying they don't know everything, yet they're perfectly right. We don't. Yet we're assumed that we are held to the standard that this new technology and this new era of life as a teenager is "so much easier". No. It is not. And speaking from a teenager who has gone through severe phases of liking and disliking being a teenager/high school student in the late 2010s and 2020s, it is definitely not the easiest time for us. We are not perfect people with perfect technology living a perfect life. We were handed the short end of the stick by being introduced to public learning with the influx of technology use and then we were handed a global pandemic, something no one alive has ever experienced something so severe as dealing with education during a pandemic. I'm not saying everyone is struggling, because some of us aren't at all. But this is NOT easy. At all.

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Adults in this day in age may not have had the technology that us students have today, which may make school seem like it's easy, but with this new technology comes more responsibility. Piles and Piles of homework assigned last minute, turning it in before midnight and not even getting 24 to complete it, and sometimes computers enjoy to completely sabotage its user. Most of us can agree that this pandemic has added a lot more stress to everyone's plate, being young and learning to deal with out emotions as well as managing our grades to satisfy our parents simply does not make our lives a little easier.

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Are you out of your vulcan mind? Since August I have barely seen hide or hair of someone I don't live with. My previously nonexistent social life has somehow become more nonexistent. Not only myself, but my family have on numerous occasions reshuffled our lives to adapt to the absolute insanity that the world has become. BOTH of my parents have been working in the hot zone for months, and my grandfather has been in the hospital twice and is very much immunocompromised. The only two good things to come out of the last 13 months is that I haven't had to see my extended family and I am not single. Other than that the year has been one comparable to the Year of Hell (ST-VOY) or the four year exodus of the Colonial Fleet, with every event just another godsdarn basetar jumping in and opening fire onto a ship that has been absorbing salvo after salvo, with no hope of respite. We live in an era of gross governmental incompetence and hypocrisy across the entire political spectrum, and on top of everything I've just mentioned, I have to balance an rigorous academic schedule with athletics. Which furthermore have been almost nonexistent, leaving me few rays of sunlight in the dark void of insanity. For crying out loud I finally got hit with all the insanity that my life has become, and that's how my girlfriend got a hyperventilating call at 0200 hours Saturday morning. Action Stations, Set condition one, load batteries alpha-delta for salvo fire, we're going toaster shopping.

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This statement wholly disregards the challenges which are posed by the virtual learning environment. The assumption that this medium is somehow easier negates the impact of the negative psychological effects especially for neurodivergent students. The at home environment is a stark contrast to the classroom and is is not by definition easier then the classroom. Factors such as the difficulty of the virtual medium, too many distractions, the struggles of learning over the computer, and simple things like poor connection makes virtual learning in some cases, more difficult then in school learning.

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To be honest, I just find statements like these rather irritating because number one it's quite the overgeneralization, which is annoying for a multitude of reasons, but number two because it's not something that can really be proven using actual evidence. For the most part, it is just a matter of opinion. Like you could try to look into statistics of student's mental health or charts of student's grades or something like that and try to use that for evidence, but that doesn't really work because it doesn't account for people's individual struggles and experiences. Basically, I personally disagree with this statement, and I find it in general pretty annoying just because I don't really think it should be considered a "claim" when really it's just a matter of opinion and your feelings on the matter are shaped on experiences and wholly depend on you, specifically, as a person. Plus, many of the people who state this and act like it's fact are people who lack understanding of the situation as a whole and what highschool students actually have to deal with on the daily.