10/30 What defines your years as a Highschooler?

This year, and more recently, I’ve been thinking about what it means that I’m a teenager. I think I have experiences that I am yet to make, and look back on, and I’ve always believed that that is something that has to come naturally. But two months into the school year, it’s getting harder and harder to fulfill a sophomore year that I’ll remember. The memories you make as a kid, that I’m supposed to be making right now, seem blocked off. It grows harder and harder to pass through my experiences, partially due to the fact that all students are stuck at home, but also because work ethics have significantly changed over time. 

Carpe diem! Seize the day! This is something that I, and I assume all students aspire to do. Currently, we’re all submerged in workload upon workload, and it seems as though we can never get the time to do what we hope to, and by the end of the day, it’s already too late. This vicious cycle is a slow burn, and it’s a pattern hard to break. For me, all of the little victories separate from education have become impossible to hustle. But then I thought to myself, surely, school work can’t be the only thing stopping me. I’m sure that some teachers genuinely do care about their students’ time in highschool. I tried to find another reason for my procrastination. 

School, as a concept, provides students with a lot of assets and background knowledge for future pursuits, but I think school’s main objective is to condition students to routine. The routine that a good number of us are going to carry into adulthood. I find it scary, knowing that people will go years, accustomed to one hour lunch breaks, and hours upon hours of JUST work. I know that as a kid, it’s my responsibility to do something with the youth that I’ve been generously provided. Obviously, during quarantine there’s only so much I can do, but I’ve had this mindset since before everything was restricted. I concluded that if life is always going to be this unremarkable, then it’s always going to be my responsibility to put my satisfaction into my own hands.

I drew a beet for my flyer. I tried to come up with something that represents memories I’ve made, and this is an old drawing, hence “not recently”. The beet, for me, was something that stayed on the whiteboard of my math class, as a tiny drawing in the bottom right corner, despite the “no drawing on the whiteboard” rule. For me, it has become a symbol of memories that I can gain separate from school curriculum. Even though it’s just a simple drawing, I cherish it’s persistence, and evidently, I’ve remembered it since.