Dear Finals Week,
You are the absolute worst. You come every semester, right on time, but nevertheless, we are always surprised to see you standing there in the doorway after Thanksgiving, tapping your fingers together maliciously. You are downright creepy, and you make student's lives miserable. Sure, you might help us pull together all our knowledge from the semester, but more often than not, you just stress everyone out.
You even ruin Christmas. We try to sing Christmas carols and drink hot cocoa, but you always sneak up behind us to smack us over the head with our ragged GPA's. It is so hard to be genuinely excited about the end of the school year when you are looming over us, reminding us that at any moment, our self-esteem could plummet into oblivion. I just want to watch Elf and let my problems slip away, but you sit right next to me poking me, reminding me that I should be studying.
How do you hold so much power over us, students? Perhaps it is because you have so many fans. A whole cheering section to be exact. Professors, parents, and boards of education cheer you on as you pummel us with question after question and finish us off with a forceful smack of a short answer question -- leaving us despondent on the floor. We then crawl off to cry and watch Christmas movies, wondering where we went wrong.
No matter how hard we study or procrastinate studying for that matter, it is never enough for you. You grace our minds with stress and anxiety while laughing maniacally at our repeated mental breakdowns. You lie to us about how much your tests are worth, convincing us that failing is the worst thing we could do. So what if we fail? You say that we will never get a good job or that we will lose our precious scholarships, but what if we don't? What if you are just overexaggerating everything, just to freak us out?
You hold immense power over us, but no longer.
You cannot rules our lives this year. No matter how many times you knock us down, we will get right back up again and keep studying. We will go to study sessions and write our essays -- working as hard as we can. We will take breaks too. We will put our mental health above our grades, knowing grades do not define us. I would rather have my kindness and thoughtfulness define me rather than some numbers on paper. Failing a test is not the worst thing in the world. We are worth more than a grade. Finals are something, but they are not everything.
So take that finals week! Come and get us!
Sincerely,
Students Everywhere