The role of our schools is to educate children and prepare them for adult life. As in many other aspects of our society today, our school systems are experiencing problems that make this goal difficult to achieve. These problems range from small problems, like disgusting cafeteria food, to big problems, like lack of respect between teachers and students. One problem that has not been completely studied in depth is fear. Fear is in our everyday lives; from the fear of a little spider to the fear of having no one to sit with at the lunch table. Everyone has fears, children and adults. The fear a teacher feels toward their students can change the way a school is run, just as much as the fear a student feels toward a teacher. Fear has a grip on today's school system and is changing the way teachers teach their students, as well as students' abilities to learn subject matter successfully. When I was in school, students ruled the school by striking fear into the hearts of teachers. They tortured teachers they didn't like by putting laxatives in their coffee or water in their gas tanks. There was a student who hadn't turned in an assignment all year but had good test scores, so he passed. At the end of the year, he turned in all his homework to the principal to show that the teacher had not graded his homework and thus get her fired. Actions like these escalated to the point where we used eight English teachers over the course of a semester. Students cannot learn subjects properly when a class goes through so many teachers. But this kind of incident was typical. Teachers feared they would be fired or that today a student would make them cry. These kinds of events don't just happen in the school I attend......in the middle of a newspaper......ied, having a good teacher or bad teacher, and whether their friends are really friends. I know from experience that school can be an extremely threatening thing. For me, high school was not easy. I remember walking down the halls and tripping and stepping on them, sitting in class with paper thrown in my hair, and walking into the lunchroom towards someone who was getting up and shouted “This is Kansas” since I was flat-chested. There were many days when I was afraid to come to school because the bullying was so intense. But that wasn't the only thing that scared me, I was also scared that my friends weren't necessarily my friends and that they would talk behind my back, which had happened several times before. There is also that teacher in every school who only focuses on certain students and therefore makes it impossible to learn the material. Students are as afraid of school as teachers.