Senioritis
SHANE MILLER, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
Beep, beep. The sound of your 7 a.m. alarm signals to you that it is time to wake up and get ready for school. Yet, unlike previous years, since I am a senior, I simply roll over, press snooze, and drift back to sleep.
For many seniors in my school, this is a daily occurrence. Sleeping through their first class or skipping their last class has become a common occurrence and a part of some students’ regular schedule.
Some of our classes, especially towards the end of the day, are definitely less filled than they should be, or at least less filled than they were in the first semester.
The reasoning for these large amounts of absences is due to a lack of motivation for seniors to show up to class. After receiving their college decisions and planning for their next four years of post-high school life, many seniors see no reason to put their full effort into their courses.
The shared feeling among all my peers is that, once we commit to college. The motivation to complete class work and be in classes each day is gone.From the fear of college rejections, many high school students experience a form of external pressure that motivates them to study late into the night and never miss a class, so that they have the highest chance to succeed in their courses. However, in the second semester of their senior year, they are finally relieved of this pressure, which puts students in a place from which they must decide whether it is important or not to put their full effort into their classes during their last months of high school.
For many students, the answer to whether or not it is important to put their full effort into school is simply no. Grades are no longer a factor and most colleges allow students to receive B’s and C’s, so there is no longer a need to put in the effort that is required to receive an A in some of your courses. In addition, seniors are now in a position from which they can see the clock ticking for when it is time to leave for college and time to leave many of their life long friends. So we choose to show up to less classes and spend more time doing the things we want to do in our last few months of high school.
While teachers do not have the ability to control a student’s decision to show up and put effort into their class, they do have the ability to change their curriculum to better account for the seniors’ lack of motivation.
“I have this independent project for their final and I have this play that I read at the end of the year, so that if [students] are here, we can read it aloud,” English teacher Valentina Gnup said. “In class, whoever’s here reads a lot, and if [the absent students] want to pick it up, they can read the part they missed on their own. So I just keep it so that whoever’s here can participate.”
Along with making the curriculum more friendly to the mindset of seniors, teachers try to attract us to class, by having fun and less stressful activities built into the course.
However, ultimately it is still the students choice to attend class. And when students choose to remain at home and skip class, it complicates teachers’ ability to teach the rest of the class.
Additionally, although the second semester of senior year marks the end of high school education, it should not mark the end of learning. This is what some of our teachers are trying to communicate to us. They want us to understand that going to college just means we are going to become adult learners, who still are going to read and try to figure things out. They want us to see as a continuation, rather than this idea that ‘Oh good, I’m done.
However, it is extremely important to not discredit the work that students have accomplished prior to their second semester of senior year. Between writing their I-Search, taking the ACT, and completing college applications, all seniors have significant achievements to celebrate. So it is not wrong to lighten the load during the second semester of senior year.Some of the teachers realize that, to some degree, this disengagement is going to happen. If students really push hard throughout high school, it makes psychological sense to lighten up a little second semester. They just want us to also remember that we’re here to learn and grow as people and that’s not done, and that’s ideally never done in our life.
