Take it to Kourt: Hamilton on plague of senioritis

Take it to Kourt: Hamilton on plague of senioritis

Kourtnee Hamilton, Copy Editor

Senioritis, as described by the popular site urbandictionary.com, is a crippling disease that strikes high school seniors. However, this dreadful disease plagues the entirety of the student body, not solely the current graduating class.

Urban Dictionary goes on to describe the symptoms of senioritis as laziness, an over-excessive wearing of track pants, old athletic shirts, sweatpants, athletic shorts and sweatshirts.

These observable behaviors caused by senioritis are apparent throughout all four grades in the school, especially as second semester begins and a good majority of students have little to no motivation for anything pertaining to school.

The combination of winter depression, spring break and summer in the distant future causes students to fall behind on their academics.

Generally speaking, students tend to have less motivation when the end of school looms in the not-so-distant future. Assignments fall into the background and things like sleep and actually maintaining some semblance of a social life thrust themselves into the forefront.

However, the lack of motivation from seniors comes from gaining acceptance to a university. When that ultimate goal of the high school career has been attained, it seems as if school is a trivial waste of one’s time.

Any desire to actually put effort into daily assignments disappears because of the more prominent desire to reach beyond the high school atmosphere and dive into adulthood.

Also included, senioritis features a lack of studying, repeated absences, and a generally dismissive attitude. Essentially, we are lazy teenagers. That would be the easy way of validating senioritis, but there is more to it than just that.

Again, the winter blues start to have an impact on students’ attitudes towards anything that pertains to their education. What use to be on-track mindsets, focused on school work, change to depressed and distracted.

Students daydream about spring break or summer plans and quite frankly, do not have the brain capacity to sit through 55-minute lectures and retain any substantial amount of the information that teachers give to them.

Our minds become so distracted, even by simple posters on the walls in the classrooms, that we cannot maintain any focus. When we get home from school, our beds call our names tauntingly, begging for us to curl up in the sheets and drift off into Dreamland.

Homework goes unattended until the next day, cramming a few problems in between classes or (teachers, you know it is true) during other classes, attempting to hide the spanish notebook behind the binder for the class students are in.

As the second semester goes on, the tragedy only gets worse. Assignments sometimes become completely ignored and grades start to fall because of these missing, incomplete assignments. Studying for tests and quizzes starts to feel unnecessary and the grades earned on those exams follow suit.

According to Urban Dictionary, the only known cure to remedy senioritis is a phenomenon known as graduation.

For seniors, we have 133 more days (including breaks and weekends) until our disease is cured. Freshman, sophomores and juniors, you have 124 days until your summer begins.

Seniors, keep trudging. Those 133 days will go by faster than we think and we will begin our journey as adults in the real world, as scary as that sounds. Underclassmen, hang in there. Make these the best years of your life, after all, #yolo. And teachers, be patient with us and try not to get too frustrated. 124 more days for you guys too.