It happened! I’m a senior now! Contrary to what everyone told me, it did not go by any faster than any other year. Right now, it’s going a lot slower. When I look back at the past few years, I’m not sure what I’ll remember the most other than the cliché and very true answer of “the people.”
I don’t really know what I did to get to this point. On some level I feel like I did absolutely nothing to reach this point — that all I did was scrape through on the bare minimum. But I know that can’t be true because I’m here in the now, getting accepted to what I consider good schools with what I consider good scholarships. The only way I feel I can truly think about my high school experience is to imagine it as a short answer test, which is what you see here.
Do you feel that you grew as a person? If so, how?
No. (Of course this is a lie, but this question is an opinion. Therefore, I can’t be wrong 🙂 )
What are three things you learned in the classroom?
I don’t know how much I learned in high school, but I know I must have learned an awful lot to be able to regurgitate it all on all the tests that came my way. Here’s some of what I think I learned.
- The Umayyad Caliphate existed and it was on one of Mr. Gore’s famous “Top 10” lists back when he taught WHAP here.
- The force of gravity, denoted as mg, always goes straight down and no matter how much I’d like it to go another way for the ease of an AP Physics FRQ, I can’t change its mind.
- Virginia Woolf was a part of something called the “Lost Generation.” She wrote in a stream of consciousness style meaning that a lot of what you read in her books is really just the refined thought puke of her characters strung together with a plot.
How would you describe your favorite part of high school?
If I were to describe my favorite part of high school, I would describe it as my favorite part of high school. (Circumlocution gets you places, kids. Even if it just gets you back where you began).
What will you take away from high school?
In terms of the physical, I will almost quite literally take nothing but an empty backpack, a few yearbooks and memorabilia, and a piece of paper with “Diploma” written on it in a fancy script. Everything else, which is mostly old papers and study materials, I would like to ceremoniously burn or at least throw away. Summer’s coming, and I don’t have any desire to open a single textbook until college (not that I opened one very often in high school) or process any intellectual thought that I don’t want to process.
Now let me get serious if only for a moment. My biggest takeaway will probably be what I’ve learned about myself. I’ll always care about the friends I made and the teachers who impacted my life, but unless my life and theirs stays in the same place it is now, all I’ll soon have are beautiful, gossamer memories that may fade over time, but will always hold. I don’t want our lives to stay in the same place because everyone I know is such an amazing person and life will take them far, maybe even far away from me as time progresses.
As for what I learned about myself, that will always stay with me. I learned my limits if only because I kept breaking them. I learned that it’s okay to just vibe as my introverted self and say no to some stuff. I learned the difference between what I actually care about, and what I only ever pretended to care about. High school gave me a lot, and I’m glad for everything good that came out of it, and I’ve seen the silver-lining in everything unpleasant that used high school as its back-drop.
High school was a vibe. Then it wasn’t (looking at you junior year). Then it was a vibe again. And now that it’s coming to its end, it just was; which is sad to think about, but whatever happens next, I’m grateful for the people I met and the time I had here.
