I figured those of you who actually read my blog have a right to know. I’ve been self-diagnosed with a horrendous, but common ailment. I have all the symptoms: exhaustion, trouble concentrating, plummeting grades and lack of interest in my daily life. It’s true, I have senioritis.
It all started when I received that beautiful envelope from my college of choice. I had just come home from school and it was sitting on my kitchen counter. The second I saw “congratulations,” my care jar emptied itself right out. I’m going to college! In celebration, I tossed my backpack into the corner of the kitchen, and there it sat for the next three and half weeks. It was only October. All the homework I’ve been able to convince myself to do since is a coloring page for my Senior English class. Yes, we were assigned a coloring page. Even the teachers recognize that we don’t have any interest in doing their assignments.
A common misunderstanding about senioritis is that people can develop it before they’re a senior. That’s not true. We’ve all heard that little sophomore complaining about doing homework stating they’ve had senioritis since freshman year. No. No, you have not. I cannot explain to you the excessive amount of willpower I have to exert simply to write this blog. You couldn’t even comprehend how unbelievably hard it is to motivate yourself to do anything as a senior.
A lack of motivation to do homework is something many high school students experience during their junior year, especially after they’ve taken the ACT. Senioritis, however, is a whole new level of lazy. The first step down this painful path is when “due tomorrow, do tomorrow” becomes a way of life. Each class becomes the time in which you do the next class’s homework. Eventually, you fall further and homework becomes unthinkable. When you get home from school and it’s the time in which you’d normally do homework, your room suddenly looks like it needs cleaning, or the dog looks like it would enjoy going on a walk. It’s just like the episode of SpongeBob Squarepants where SpongeBob is trying to write an essay about what not to do at a stoplight and literally everything is more interesting than writing that essay. Soon enough, you even give up doing other productive things in place of the homework and just waste your days on the internet or watching Netflix. Just a warning, don’t get Netflix as a senior if you don’t already have it. You won’t touch another book.
As you fall further into the world of being a senior suffering from this sickness, even showing up to school becomes difficult. Sleep is precious thing as a teenager, and as a senior it becomes the center of your life. Waking up in the morning for school is battle that is lost many, many times by seniors. It’s easy to rationalize it to yourself. Woke up ten minutes late? Mind as well skip the whole morning.
On the upside, with all of the newly found free time seniors have not doing homework, and barely going to school, it’s the perfect time for self-improvement! Read those books that have been sitting on your bookshelf for months. Go to the gym. Learn an instrument that you’ve always wanted to. Do whatever you want, really, because in another year, you’ll all be freshmen again and all of that senior freedom goes right out the window.
