From trickling in and out of the College Counseling office to in and out of class, seniors have stumbled into their last quarter of high school. But beyond our extensive bathroom breaks, frequent visits to Mrs. Willet and accumulating tardies, there’s a certain energy in the air that can only be seen in the brightening under eyes and returning smiles of the Class of 2024.
Town Square in a snapshot: seniors laying under a UV index of 8, donning tank tops and board shorts after a taxing first semester of sweats and slippers. Balls bounce off the spikeball net as a student yells “heads up!” to the dodging circle of friends on the turf. The best part? Not an AP Government textbook or Calculus worksheet in sight.
Senioritis is developing like our tans and film pictures from spring break. Sometime between October and April, anxiety about that AP Statistics test turned into a comforting reassurance that at the end of the day, everything is well. Each day, our notes and annotations (or lack thereof) further resemble the trademark chicken scratch writing on our class t-shirts—at least it’s fitting.
I present to you three types of Sage Hill second semester seniors—whether these are comedic caricatures or accurate depictions will be left up to you. First, the hamsters. Hamsters are the seniors that never got back off the wheel. After all, four consecutive years of constant grind on those Chemistry pre-labs and History notecards make it hard to return to a life untainted by academic and social pressure. Our advice to you? Say goodbye to titrations and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.
Second, the online daters. Online daters are the seniors messaging fifteen potential college roommates all at once. Online daters are counting down the days until graduation and are eager to connect with any future classmate that says they’re down for “a night in or a night out.” They’re most looking forward to paper toss day and taking pictures in everyone’s college sweatshirts. It’s a safe bet that they already have “The Spins” and “Where’d All the Time Go” queued up on Spotify for the last day of high school.
Third and most common, the part-timers. Part-timers run on their own schedule. They skip class to catch up on a week’s worth of missing assignments—it’s a perpetual cycle but they swear it’s a valid tradeoff, a concept they almost understood in the AP Economics class they sporadically drop into. You can find them reading Litcharts in between classes and walking into class late with a coffee and bagel in hand.
Maybe you see yourself in one of these characters, maybe you see yourself as a triad of them all. I happen to fall towards the latter, but whichever you may be, we were all once playing icebreakers on Zoom, balancing our English portfolio visuals down the stairs and hovering next to each other at Big Bear retreat as marshmallows caught on fire. So, if you’ve got a bad case of Senioritis, just know that it took me over three months to get to writing this article.
And on that note, I’m signing off.
