As a student of Canton Public Schools for nearly 12 years, I have come across and gone through some very good and bad experiences. Each of these has come with its own lesson and purpose for happening, but nothing has hit me as hard as second semester senioritis. I have barely made it through January, yes, January, and at the rate things are going, 3 months is going to feel like 3 years. I know everyone says I will miss this, and I’m sure I might, but the truth is I’ve sort of plateaued here. Canton has been great to me, and I’ve been thankful for all the help along the way, but I’m coming to find more and more that it doesn’t offer what I need. This, in turn, drives me slightly crazy and makes me really question why I’m still going. It makes me question why I still need to wake up in the morning, why I need to show up to school on time, and lastly and most importantly why I ever let school stress me out so much in the past.
I’ve come a long way since freshman year. I can remember walking the halls worrying about getting lines of a script memorized while stressing about a math test coming up and then having to go to a several hour football practice afterwards. It was not fun at all and more importantly I was always stressed. I was involved in literally everything: STUCO, Special Olympics, Speech, Yearbook, FFA, History Day, Football, Academic Team, and of course my four core classes. This was very fun and gave me lots of opportunities, but it spread me very thin and I could not handle it. Between the stress, and the stupidity of a teenage boy’s brain, I made a lot of bad decisions that got me into trouble the first couple of years of my highschool experience.
All of these mishaps were just the beginning of the burnout now known as Senioritis. I blame the largest portion of my severe case of this disease on one thing, and one thing only, quarantine. For nearly 6 months I did nothing but work, hang out with friends, take in the lake, go on adventures, and so much more. So coming back to school in August was extremely difficult. Then we were hit with the quarantine periods, in which I had a lot of fun at my house. These 2 sessions started a snowball effect that not even the biggest block in the path could stop. Might I mention this was just the first semester, and we hadn’t even touched Christmas break yet.
Following the beloved Christmas break, I was greeted with the worst of all things, the third nine weeks. This is the slowest time of the year with no breaks and few activities. I can barely make it through a day of this school that feels more like a morgue on a cold day. The large bricks in the wall bring in cold from the outside and hold it, then slowly leak it into the school, keeping it freezing cold. Thinking about this while laying in my warm bed every morning makes it hard to want to come, especially on time. The days that turn into weeks are monotonous and leave me very bored. I know it means I’m getting closer to graduation, but I can barely wait.
This ride has gone on for what seems like an eternity, so it is really hard to be excited about things that I’ve seen and done almost a million times. A lot of people may say I have just gotten lazy as well, but that’s not it. It’s just way too hard to find a reason to care, it’s way too hard to do this, it’s Senioritis.