As the year begins to wind down, I hold on the hope that soon enough, after four long quarters of countless essays, books read, packets annotated, and Honors Chemistry tests cried over, the worst year of my high school experience will be over.
Upon coming into junior year after a footloose and fancy free summer with little to no educational activities, I was not properly prepared for the transition into what I would soon realize was a deathtrap filled with countless hours of uninteresting schoolwork and concepts that will most likely never again enter my life.
In the first several weeks I realized that in many of my classes, graded discussions would be a common activity we would do to fill up class time. It took me several more weeks to figure out that if I wanted to get anything above a zero as a grade, I had to actually speak in the discussions instead of dozing off in an effort to ignore the pretentious people only trying to please the teacher. I also learned that, if a large portion of someone’s grade in a class is based on participation and a point is earned every time you speak, I should not be surprised by some of the silly things that come out of people’s mouths. In saying that, the only real time I saw people making honest and genuine comments during a discussion was during a slightly heated discussion during the FSL scandal where people seemed to throw away their filters and not care about whether they were offending a teacher of another student.
As more time went by, I forced myself to conform and joined the group of participation point earners because I realized it was the only way to succeed in classes whether or not what I said made any sense or not.
Although I made more of an effort in class, it did not help make the homework load any lighter, but there really was no solution to that except plough through it as best I could. I would do it all to the point where all the information I had learned seemed to accumulate into a big ball of mush in my brain and then wash out in the morning after a nice four hours of sleep. Although I did go to sleep at a late hour, some of it was a cause of too much Facebook stalking which I mostly regret because I set my expectations too high for people’s old profile pictures.
The year continued for me as normal, turning in the majority of my assignments. At one point I thought to myself that, if my grade percentages were actually a batting average, I could be a pretty average baseball player.
All this being said, I have learned more about myself this year than I have during any other year. Much of my newly acquired knowledge is that of things that I wished I had never learned or that I could fix, but still I have learned how to deal with a lot of difficult situations. From all the challenges that have been thrown at me this year, I have learned to be much more responsible and to take matters into my own hands rather than waiting around in the hope that things will get done. Although the majority of the subjects that I have learned in class will most likely never show up in my life again, I have learned how to organize and manage the work load while building up a tolerance for tedious and uninteresting work that will most likely help me later in life. With out the struggles that I underwent and lessons that I have learned this year, I think that it would have been hard to continue through the rest of my life with the easy going and relaxed view on important topics that I had in previous years. I hope and expect that these lessons will help me next year to make my life easier and make senior year be my most happy and successful year here.
