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All high school students today, me included, know that high school is just a period to get good grades so that colleges recognize us. We know that it is good to take A.P. classes, and we know that it is good to take the classes that will look good on a college application or that will have to deal with what we plan on majoring in in college.

Personally, I am right in the middle of this, end of my sophomore year, beginning to schedule classes for my junior year. The thought of college pretty much has high school students planning what they want to do with the rest of their lives at about 15-16 years old!

Also, you have the thought of S.A.T.'s. This is a test that high school students are led to believe, and sometimes rightly, will determine whether they get into a good college or not. This test, a test that takes up about half of one day, we spend months studying for because college is so important, and this, combined with the stress of tests in high school, can create a horribly unhealthy lifestyle, both for the mind and the body.

The thought alone of all this stress is, well, daunting, but we have all experienced, are experiencing, or will experience it, even more so I can predict in the coming years. The stress can cause some students to be labeled "geeks" or "slackers" by some standards, and can cause some students to miss out on probably one of the best times in their lives. This time should bring about boyfriends/girlfriends, learning to work, taking classes that you would like to take, not that they want you to take, etc.

Then you have senioritis, as my teachers call it. Senioritis is defined as what a student suffers through concerning his attitude towards school after accepted to college, or decide that they are not going, either way, it results in extreme slacking, sometimes behavioral problems, and lack of caring any more. A lot of my friends have this, and one of my friends has had senioritis since the the end of his junior year, so he scheduled his four core classes and four study halls. He had two of them back to back at the end of the day, and he applied for early release, and he was getting out of school at about 1:30, whereas everyone else gets out at 2:40.

The reason for senioritis is that students feel like they have been "screwed over" by school for all these years, and now it's time that they can relax before they start college or join the workforce. No matter how obvious this is, some people don't realize that our minds would rather relax than work most of the time. The best way students is can handle this is to schedule lighter classes rather than no classes, and they can still study and use this time to develop skills for college.

Overall, students suffer from stress from college, and many deal with it irrationally, making it hard for people around them and for themselves, when their high school years should be a time of preparing, not for life planning. This makes lives difficult, and I think that we all need to take a look at the school system and ask ourselves, is this the way I want my kids/myself preparing for the rest of their/my lives/life?

Learn more about this author, Jacob Reis.
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