Will Our Seniors Become Slackers?

I went to open house out of nostalgia. I thought about how, as a senior, this was my last chance to go, and for some reason that made me sad. So I went with my parents and was very surprised about what the teachers had to say.

Almost every single teacher warned senior parents about the very scary epidemic of senioritis that affects seniors during the second semester of their last year of high school. Apparently, it can turn the best of students into careless slackers, and seniors who had A’s in a class first semester often drop down to D’s or even F’s. Once all the applications have been sent in, and seniors know where they’re going to college, they have very little motivation to try super hard. And after 3.5 years at one of the hardest schools in the country, who can blame them for not wanting to work so hard when they no longer have a reason to?

Even the senior parents at open house seemed to reflect the sentiment students with senioritis have towards being in high school. The classrooms for students in other grades were filled beyond seating capacity with inquisitive parents. The largest number of parents I saw in a senior classroom was seven. It seems as if the epidemic doesn’t just affect students. Parents also think that they don’t have to care as much during their students’ last year of high school.

Can the epidemic of senioritis really be as serious as everyone led me to believe? If it’s as much of a problem as senior teachers seemed to indicate, this disease affects the personalities of the seniors it consumes. There are a lot of people at our school who work extremely hard because it’s part of who they are and how they function. Can senioritis really change these students? Seniors have more freedom with class selection that other grades, and are more likely to be taking the classes that interest them the most. One would think that although by the end of the year seniors don’t have as much reason to be motivated, their motivation could come from being interested in their classes and wanting to learn. After all, that’s why we all came to UHS; we like to learn.

I’m probably too optimistic. By the end of the year, I am sure most seniors will want to move on to better things than high school. Whether this will affect the seniors’ work ethic is debatable, but it certainly won’t drive them to work harder. I hope my class will function in spite of the disease and we won’t all graduate with D’s on our transcripts, but we will have to wait until second semester to find out whether the seniors will survive the horrible plague of senioritis.

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