Listen up, Glenbrook South. How’s block schedule goin’ for ya? Don’t answer aloud, or you’ll look like a weirdo talking to your computer. Back to blocks, people! Blocks are long. This year we had to adjust. In one sitting, we have twice the math, twice the English, twice the science, and twice the gym.

I know what you were thinking when you first looked at your schedule. ‘What are we going to do for 90 minutes of gym?’ It turns out that we have a little bit of fitness, and a little bit of fun. To be quite honest, Gym didn’t turn out to be as strenuous as I thought, but I know that South ran into its first block problem.

Really? Really. The locker rooms smell like a putrid, post-apocalyptic wasteland. It’s almost as bad as the stench that flows out of the bathrooms every day. If I were to whip out my handy dandy olfactometer, the odor intensity would be pretty darn high.

I noticed the problem at the beginning of the year when I was walking behind a student wearing a gym uniform. Although I was walking nearly ten feet behind this guy, the stench of his uniform trailed behind him and brought tears to my eyes. My nose started running, and I began to have an existential crisis at the thought of our generation devaluing cleanliness.

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind filling my lungs with the gritty combination of muddy grass stains and other horrible sweaty sensations, but what is going on in the locker rooms this year is much worse.

Seeing that we are on the block schedule, each gym class is twice as long as previous years. That means that most kids actually break a sweat. Then, these students toss their sweaty uniforms into their locker, connected to other lockers with sweaty uniforms, where the sweat ferments just in time for the stench to be unbearable.

There are a couple of things that can be done to stop this pungent problem. First and foremost, wash your uniforms more frequently. If you can take it home over the weekend, do it.

There are fresheners installed in the gym corridors, but we must have more fresheners installed in the locker rooms themselves–that’s where we need them the most. We deserve nasal equality in all parts of the building, and the locker rooms are no exception.