Senioritis; A Dreaded Disease

Senior year. The one we've always heard about. The year which hundreds of ex-Jamesville-Dewitt High School students will tell you is the easiest year of school, aside from Kindergarten.

But as a senior J-DHS student myself, I'm here to inform you that they were only half right.

The beginning of senior year is riddled with tension, anxiety and vast amounts of extra homework, even for someone like myself who takes two general classes; at least until Dec 1. College applications take hours and hours of work, not to mention the bubbling anxiety that reaches a fever pitch right before the SEND button is clicked on commonapp.org. After all, that's your whole future right there, written into the electronic system and speeding towards an unknown, heavenly-like destination where iron guards stand at the gate, denying those deemed unworthy to ever step foot there. We click the send button anyway (or risk plummeting into the futureless black hole that teachers always talk about to students who "“gasp"“ decide not to go to college). Now, it's waiting time.

And then the day the dreaded, yet anticipated letter arrives; with "CONGRATULATIONS" the first and most prominent word on the page, perhaps accompanied by a bumper sticker or if you're really lucky, a T-shirt. A heart skip, an extraordinary burst of happiness and a quick Log-In to Facebook to change your status and BOOM! It hits. You're really going.

Enter SENIORITIS: the lack of motivation felt by second-semester high school seniors who are nearing the end of their schooling careers. As defined by Wikipedia, the symptoms of senioritis include:

-procrastination
-lack of motivation
-a drop in academic performance
-"coasting" the act of going through classes with very little concentration or application of intent along with truancy and frequent tardiness

All of these symptoms can be observed throughout the entire senior class grade; people go out to breakfast during first period study hall, or neglect to do their physics homework that was assigned the day before. I personally am afflicted with Senioritis; the only class I even try in anymore is my SUPA English class, where any sign of laziness means ultimate defeat (enter unit 2, where I barely did any of the pre-essay assignments and therefore ended up changing my thesis three weeks before the monstrous paper was due. I barely slept for weeks). But although Senioritis is considered an adequate excuse to many high school students, colleges refuse to consider it; some even revoke admission to those students whose grades drop dramatically in the last semester of high school. The National Association for College Admission Counseling reports that 68.7 percent of colleges that revoke admission to students do it over cases of bad senioritis.

But those incidents are few and far between. Mostly, Senioritis means a justification of the laziness each senior wishes he/she could have partaken in during junior year, an increased longing to escape the confinements of high school, and a general increase in relaxation and happiness. After all, we've worked so hard to get where we wanted to be, so why not get that late arrival pass and sleep in a little? It's definitely deserved.

Learn more about the dangers of Senioritis here: http://www.nacacnet.org/PublicationsResources/steps/Articles/Pages/FinishingStrong.aspx