Senioritis Meets Coronavirus
The Moment It All Changed For The Class of 2020 By Louisa Kuhn The alarm goes off— it’s 6:45. You press snooze and roll back into a deep sleep. Before you know it, your mom comes in screaming. It’s already 8 o’clock and you’re late for school! Still, with zero motivation, you slump out of bed and carelessly throw on a pair of sweatpants— you’re too lazy to wash your uniforms. At 8:47, finally awake, you make it out the door and drive with the music blasting. Once at school, you approach the front desk, where you sign the late-in sheet for the third time that week. Now, the second class has begun and though “present,” you already find yourself asleep in the first 15 minutes of math. This repetitive cycle that perpetuates almost every morning is what appears to be a chronic case of senioritis.
Senioritis is the “sickness” that almost every senior seems to catch at the beginning of second semester. Urban Dictionary lists the symptoms: “laziness, a lack of motivation, excessive absences in school, putting off assignments.” The list goes on. By the end of the year, students in every grade begin to feel some of these symptoms, but we seniors are hit in a whole other way. We presume a sense of accomplishment, knowing we will graduate and go on to a university that accepted us. As a near graduate, you can almost feel as if school work doesn’t even apply to you any more. Why take the test when you’re already accepted into college and it won’t even help you anymore? you might start to wonder. Why even come to school? These are a few of the questions that flutter through the mind of a senior starting as early as January.
But beginning this January, the entire planet’s Class of 2020 started to become affected by a completely different disease that changed our senior year and all our lives for good, COVID-19. Just as we were all beginning to feel the effects of senioritis, a real pandemic, the first in a century, changed all our lives entirely. All around the world, businesses have shut down, unemployment has sky-rocketed, we’ve soared past a million confirmed cases, and close to 100,000 in the U.S. alone have died. Now, the “illness” that had consumed us seniors previously appears so trivial, This... is school? Class in quarantine in the face of a real virus now
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