At the beginning of second semester, I found myself slowly lacking more and more motivation. And then, all at once, when I started hearing college decisions, I lost almost all of the motivation I still had. Whereas I’d read assigned texts (especially novels) closely, I now skim, retaining far less information. Whereas I used to write and rewrite and edit and edit before I turned an assignment in, I now just submit a first draft. Whereas I used to spend hours on homework a night, I now usually quit after 8:30. The only class I still do all the work for is math, and that’s just because of the AP test. This is classic senioritis and I have no intention to fight it.
Why this happens is pretty obvious: there’s no more incentive to try. While you still need to pass, there’s little reason to keep up the quality of the work you’d done in years past. This isn’t necessarily because I don’t want to learn. I do, but most of the learning I want to do is outside of school as it has been since freshman year. Back then I had to slot in those movies, books, and everything else I wanted to do between my classwork, and now I can do the opposite. This is a blip, I know, and starting in the fall I’ll once again have to work my own interests into my school schedule, and it’s one I want to take full advantage of.
So what should be done about senioritis? Well a big step was taken when May Term was implemented, and the easiest way to make it more effective is to expand it. It’s currently only two weeks, much of which overlaps with the civil rights trip and AP tests I am attending and taking which means that I will only be May Term-ing for six days. May Term should start at the beginning of May rather than in the middle. That is necessary as we are all going to be incredibly checked out in those last couple weeks and a longer window will force our projects to have more depth.
The problem at the heart of senioritis is we don’t really care about the work we’re doing, an attitudinal dilemma I don’t see an easy solution to.
Senior year we get to choose our classes, (though the way the schedule works makes it such that it’s difficult to get the classes you want), so we should be interested and thus independently motivated to do the work. This is probably an innovation that was implemented some years ago to combat senioritis, but clearly, it didn’t work, because no matter how interesting my class is, I just feel an absolute lack of motivation to do the work. So, how do we change a transactional school system that leads to this absolute lack of motivation when we’re no longer working towards any discernible goal?
I really don’t know the solution to this problem. How do you change the basic structure of school? Can one school really change the point of school without others following the same path? I have no idea. Some schools have already done things like eliminating grades, but I’m not sure how that impacts college admissions which will always be an important part of any high school’s function. Parker could also allow students or force students to take on more independent study type projects in the second semester, but I’m not sure there’s enough faculty that are free to help create a program like that. Even though I don’t have an actual solution, I know what’s happening now isn’t working.
