Senioritis: Kicking in Already?

It’s February. The second marking period and the first semester are over. College applications are finally finished and mid-year grades are being finalized to be sent out to the schools.

Enter the second-semester senior.

Senioritis, the senior version of procrastination, is already in the air, but when those mid-year grades are sent out, senioritis hits an all-time high. Since colleges make decisions before the end of our school year, seniors have little reason to care about second semester. Thus the term “second-semester senior.”

So are seniors excited for the upcoming semester?

“Hell yeah!” says Jamesville-DeWitt High School senior Jessica Kramer. Kramer says that she won’t stay up past 11:30 p.m. doing homework anymore.

J-DHS senior Liz Beville couldn’t care less about her second semester grades. “If I get a zero, I won’t worry about it as much.” Micha Williams, also a senior at J-DHS, agrees, but only to an extent. “I’ll definitely coast second semester. There’s not really much pressure.” She says, however, that she will want to maintain a B average.

Some, however, still feel the need to keep grades up.

J-DHS senior Devan Ramachandran explained that he goes to school to get an education, so keeping his grades up is an unsaid.

“I’m excited that it’s senior year, but I still have to keep my grades up,” says J-DHS senior Angela Wesley.

But while second semester is supposed to be more relaxed for seniors, it brings more work for teachers.

“I’m very concerned that I may have some kids that may slack off and see themselves as second-semester seniors,” says English teacher Diane Rushford. She teaches seniors in Corporate Communications. “I think students should have a nice balance for second semester. They shouldn’t blow off their work because it’s the second semester. Students know they can do better, but are satisfied with just getting by.”

Mrs. Rushford thinks students shouldn’t be in such a hurry to grow up and enter the real world. Mrs. Rushford says, “If you stop developing your learning and school skills in the spring semester, unfortunately it will be harder to get back on track in the fall.”

She feels that school and getting an education in general are like studying a foreign language because “if you don’t practice, you’ll lose your abilities.”
Most teachers, like Mrs. Rushford, teach seniors as well as underclassmen. The physics teachers, on the other hand, deal exclusively with seniors because of the rigid way science courses in high school are laid out. Doug Wilson, who teaches both Regents and AP Physics, knows the second-semester senior all too well.

“Students are””for the most part””very conscientious in the first part of the year, thinking about colleges, admissions, and possibly taking the SAT again,” says Mr. Wilson. “They are pretty grade-conscious.” But, he says, as they finish the college application process and start getting accepted, they begin to lose motivation. “I think the amount of motivation (of students) is directly tied into [the college] process.”

Mr. Wilson knows that being accepted into a college is a big weight off seniors’ shoulders, and he understands that it’s hard to stay motivated in classes.

“It’s a big weight off your shoulders. I felt the same way in my senior year.”

After being accepted, he says, students don’t feel compelled to work hard because they don’t feel they have anything else to work for.

But that doesn’t mean to say Mr. Wilson accepts seniors slacking off. If someone were to become a second-semester senior, he would definitely confront it. “Last year, I had a student in Regents Physics who was slacking off in the second semester. Eventually his behavior became so disruptive we made an arrangement for him to drop the class.” And this wasn’t even in the beginning of the second semester””this happened well into the third marking period. Mr. Wilson takes the second semester senior very seriously, evident in the many letters he has written to colleges about student misconduct and laziness in class.

“(Students) think that a letter is a hollow threat, but I’ve written quite a few of those,” he says.

As for students saying that they don’t care about grades after first semester, Mr. Wilson doesn’t buy it for one second. “I’m not convinced that students aren’t bothered by low grades. To go through 11.5 years of school, you can’t just stop caring in one day.”

So can you really be a second semester senior?

Well, you can. That is, if you truly don’t care about school and want to take the risk of having a college rescind your admission. In that case, go ahead.

I would follow J-DHS senior Dennis Zhou’s example: “I’m going to tone it down. Maybe settle for an A- instead of an A.”

Or not.