Work Smarter, Not Harder Is My Motto As A Second Semester Senior

There is a certain level of understood laziness that comes with being a senior. A laziness that teachers know is coming and one that we know that there is nothing that can be done to avoid. The laziness of senior year, that only ends with the excitement of graduation. This is pretty much a year long thing, however, when it comes to second semester, the laziness is taken to a whole new level.

By this point, most of us are done with college applications and have gotten our acceptances. A good amount of us already know where we are going to go. Because of this, the effort level that we put into our work goes from actually working to do well so we can get into the college of our choice to just barely showing up and doing the minimal amount of work required of us — not because we care, but because we want to exempt finals.

By senior year, many of us have cars and are able to drive to school, which means that actually making it to school on time becomes a new challenge to us. As time goes by, I notice that we arrive to school later. Even with our school's new policy that if you aren't in your first period when the bell rings at 8:20 a.m., you will have a lunch detention, we still tend to look past that and pull into our parking spot every morning at 8:19 a.m., finding ourselves running into the school in a full sprint to avoid dreaded lunch detentions.

Every day, I see seniors coming into school 30 minutes late with Starbucks or Chic-Fil-A. Not because they had a doctors appointment or something, but they needed their beauty sleep and a well balanced breakfast.

Looking around, it's pretty obvious that a good amount of seniors drop that "above and beyond" mentality by now. We are spending less time on our Chromebooks writing papers and doing assignments and more time on game consoles that people bring into class to play "Super Smash Bros. Ultimate." And they just pull them out in the middle of class.

There are fewer senior skip days; however the ones that we do have, it seems like there are more and more of us that are gone. It seems like for seniors, the flu is becoming a year round epidemic ,and the Superbowl is considered an okay excuse for not being at school. My biggest problem in terms of school has gone from not getting an A on a test to trying to figure out where the heck I'm going to be getting breakfast every morning now that the Chic-Fil-A closed.

We spend more time than we would like to admit at school trying to figure out the newest ways to beat the system. We have figured out what teachers we need to kiss up to, which ones we need to avoid and which people in administration we need to become friends with. The truth is, if you befriend the right teachers and make the right moves, you can get away with a lot more at the school. We have spent more time learning how to cheat the system than we have learning what we are being taught.

Regardless of what type of senior you are, we all feel the same type of exhaustion and laziness from making it this far. Now, as we are in the final stretch of senior year, with 98 days, 14 hours and 30 minutes until we graduate, we truly begin to see just how hard it is to get to where we are. We look back at everything we have done, and some of us wonder how we got here, others wonder how we are going to make it to the end, but no matter what you are thinking in these final days, you know that it really has been a wild ride.