Senioritis
It’s May. End of the school year. The time when my fellow teachers and I take stock of what has been gained from the past 10 months. With the gains, we also assess the things we lost: dry erase markers, staplers, answer-keys, dignity, limbs, the color of our hair. For those teachers burnt out or constantly clashing with their students, the end of the year couldn’t come soon enough.
My novel Reading Blue Devils examines the things we gain and lose over the course of a school year and how they are predicated on staff and student interactions. In the fictionalized Reading High School, the staff is culturally ignorant and quickly dismissive of the students. In reality, this type of neglect is rampant in many schools today, and it causes a host of problems, not just for our students and staff, but for our communities as well. It is for this reason we need to be serious about addressing the inequities of education between zip codes, and the lack of cultural understanding between our adults and our kids.
But that’s a topic for another post. I want to focus on a different problem, one I’ve battled for the past eight years I’ve been a teacher. If anything, it’s a more talked about problem in the American education system than the achievement gap, as sad as that is in reality. Maybe if we can take care of this one issue we can tackle the other, more serious ones? Maybe by winning this small battle we can engage in bigger ones? Okay then, here it goes:
We need to stop saying senioritis.
Senioritis: the condition ascribed to 12th graders across America, especially those in their last semester. It describes their general lethargy and apathy toward assignments, teachers, school events…just, high school. They can’t even.
And you know what? We’re enabling these wayward teens by categorizing their behaviors with a faux-medical terminology. Because if their behavior has a name, it means it’s an accepted condition, which means other people have it, which comforts the conformity-craving adolescents. It allows them to dismiss our pleas to change. Teens thrive on this uniformity, and when we label a behavior it normalizes it, and thus we justify its existence.
The problem is that this pattern of behavior is not senioritis. It’s stupidity. It’s laziness. It’s the opposite of grit (education buzzword alert!), and it doesn’t deserve a cutesy name. We let seniors cloak themselves in the word, as if it can give them invisibility or immunity. It deserves to be put in a corner and shamed.
There’s a word to describe the feeling of wanting to disrobe while you dance—mbuki-mvuki. Imagine using that to justify your stupid behavior. “Why are you naked?! You are freaking out the wedding party and all the guests!” “Oh, I’m sorry. I have mbuki-mvuki.”
This is what we let our kids do with senioritis, and it’s why we need to expel the word from our vocabulary. Let’s toss it with other expressions like “funtivities,” “piggyback on that,” and “the real world.” From there, our Chemistry teachers can combust the pile in a totally awesome conflagration.
But let’s not heap all the blame on the pimple-faced pubescents. When we see people in their late teens sleepwalking through their final year of high school, we need to rethink whom we are pointing our fingers at.
Yes, senioritis is also our fault.
We adults relish the word. Just as it allows students to disregard the habits we cultivated for 11+ years, it gives us adults permission to dismiss our students. It gives us an out from holding them accountable. We say things like, “There’s nothing we can do with them, they have…senioritis.” We utter the word with complete condescension or swooning, hand-to-the-forehead dismay. The word gives us an out from trying.
Senioritis is similar to tendonitis, I suppose. Tendonitis requires the sufferer to take a break from activities that aggravate their tendons. For senioritis, seniors take a break from school activities that aggravate their tendency to instant gratification. And for adults, it lets us take a break from people that aggravate our tender patience. It’s nonsense. And it comes from our desire to name every dang thing we can.
Sure, some things do warrant a name and a categorization, especially actual medical conditions. If we know what we are suffering from, it consoles us and, more importantly, gives us and the medical experts advising us clear direction.
But senioritis is as legit as the 47 identities we try on throughout high school. While we use the summer to lick our wounds (by this I mean, lick the salt off the rims of margarita glasses), we have some serious soul searching to do. Do we want to truly prepare our youth for the harsh realities of the real world? Or do want to let our seniors skate by, giving them meaningless funtivities because we don’t want to fight the battle of laziness that’s so pervasive in our culture? To piggyback off these rhetorical questions: do we want to actually solve the problem of adolescent immaturity, or do we want to continue to exacerbate it?
Let’s stop empowering poor habits. Let’s stop giving names to every stupid behavior we see. Let’s take back our high schools by getting rid of senioritis once and for all.
And while we’re doing that, let’s tackle the more serious issues in education as well.
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