As the school year starts to conclude, the second semester pressure begins to set in for many students. Balancing exhaustion and depleted motivation with academic demands and upcoming exams can be very difficult, but we are all pushing ourselves to make it over the finish line. The days can start to blend together into a blur of assignments and assessments.
This is my personal experience as a junior who is graduating a year early.
My weekdays begin with a series of alarms. Three for the person I want to be, and one for the person I am. These days, I usually end up dragging myself out of bed at around 7 a.m. (maybe 6:30 if I somehow manage to make it to bed before 1 a.m. the night before). I have never been a morning person, but still, splash water on my face to wake up and get ready for school. Before I leave, I find some form of caffeine to drink on the way to school. I roll out of my driveway around 7:40, and then you’d find me trying to parallel park on the side of McNeil Dr. around 8:00.
Walking into school, I always have my headphones on. Matter of fact, I typically have them on anytime that I can throughout the day. I listen to a wide range of music, basically everything from Juice Wrld and Z-ro to the Marias and Lana Del Rey. Music fills in the gaps of my life I would otherwise spend bored or consumed in my own thoughts.
Once I make it to my desk, my day of stress begins. Thankfully, B days are generally my easier days. My first class is Earth Science Systems. Honestly, I tend to use this class as a period to work on other classes when the work assigned is not very time consuming. I like this class a lot because it’s pretty laid back, and I have found the subject content to be really interesting.
“My favorite thing about this class is probably the people in it,” senior Nate Berg said. “They make it more enjoyable even when things are boring.”
During PIT, I usually spend the time chipping away at the multitude of assignments I seem to constantly have due at any given moment. When the bell rings, I navigate through the sea of unhurried students (who never seem to notice my efforts to pass them) to my advanced Spanish 3 class.
“The hardest project [we’ve had] has to be the [telenovela project],” sophomore Aaron Walker said. “We had to plan a plot and a script and it was pretty hard to fill a three minute video speaking only in a different language”.
I have found that my knowledge of another language has made it fairly easy to pick up new phrases in Spanish, but sometimes I have trouble switching between the languages in my head. This class is generally pretty straightforward.
After Spanish, I typically work on homework through lunch. After that, I head to my AP precalculus class. I like this class as well because we do a lot of notes and I can usually pick up the material pretty fast.
“The homework in this class can be kind of time consuming,” junior Gavin Patel said. “But it feels good when you finally understand the concepts and can solve the problems.”
Finally, my last class of the day is government. This class mostly consists of class-long lectures and occasional assignments.
“I’d say the best part of Government is Mr. Lindsay’s teaching style,” senior Yahya Abdalla said. “He makes class really entertaining.”
When the last bell rings, I hurry to my car in the pursuit of leaving before the buses. At home, I set up my desk to work on homework and out-of-school classes. The past few months I have found myself trying to get done as much as possible immediately after school, before my motivation wears off. I am enrolled in two asynchronous online classes outside of school: advanced algebra 2 (through UT high school) and US history 2 (through ACC). My drive to succeed can typically last for about two to three hours consecutively. When the screen time finally gets to my head, I always switch to journaling or drawing before I return to my work. I feel like my entire life revolves around school.
Truth be told, I am not highly motivated by academic success. I have always been far more inclined to put my personal crafts (drawing and writing) above my academic responsibilities. I would say I am an average student, and truthfully, I wouldn’t be graduating early if the circumstances were different. The reason I have decided to pursue this path is because personally, I feel isolated at Vandegrift. Although there are some really great students and teachers here, my high school experience has been a constant struggle to connect with my peers; and after three years, it can become pretty exhausting. That isn’t to say Vandegrift isn’t a wonderful school, but I don’t believe this is the place for me. However, I am excited to be pushing myself towards a new chapter of my life and am extremely optimistic about the future.
