Senioritus Meets Coronavirus: The Moment It All Changed

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!

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.

8 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. 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, in the face of a real virus now This... is school? Class in quarantine

settled across the globe. The ordinary events in our daily lives and typical routines abruptly came to an end when the deadly Coronavirus took control.

At the onset, some may have viewed it as a weird blessing to get out of school after feeling so completely checked out, but through this senior’s eyes, I see it as a curse. Trapped in quarantine, I’m realizing the best semester of high school never really happened. There was no prom, no spring sports, no end-ofthe-year senior traditions, and maybe even no graduation. The uncertainty has been the worst part. For weeks, the question that every senior was dying to know constantly circled our brains: Would we be going back to school at all? Soon enough, we discovered our entire on-campus life was officially over. Now that the uncertainty was gone, we had to instead cope with the fact that we might never wear our Porter-Gaud uniforms again.

I think everyone at Porter-Gaud can relate when I say I actually miss coming to school every day instead of being trapped at home for weeks. Being stuck in quarantine consists of endless family dinners, constant Zoom classes, almost too many movies, and worst of all, being isolated from all your friends. Netflix and family bonding may have seemed like a nice way to spend your time, but after so much together time, even the same shows and same family dinner conversations tend to become uneventful. Seeing everyone’s faces on Zoom just isn’t the same as the typical classes we were all used to in the past. The craziest part of the pandemic may be the fact that the whole world’s Class of 2020, whether in college or high school, can relate to the same “senior feelings” of wanting to have a normal last semester. We don’t realize how much we take for granted and actually enjoy the time at school with our closest friends until we no longer can.

When I started this article, the word “coronavirus” hadn’t even been heard by most of us. Instead, I was writing about what it feels like to be a typical senior in her last semester. However, flash-forward a month

Our new normal

or so, and I’m in bed at home watching way too many shows on Netflix. My article’s focus quickly transitioned from the unmotivated student who longed for a break to someone who actually wants to return to the same routine from before. Someone who wants to finish the best semester of high school. Someone who wants to come together as a graduating class and celebrate all we have accomplished.

So, to future seniors, don’t get wrapped up in the lazy feelings of senioritis. Instead, cherish the time you have left to enjoy high school, because, as we’ve all learned, it can be gone in an instant. The Coronavirus has affected everyone in this school and around the world, so we need to remember to enjoy every moment while we can, no matter what the situation. It’s crazy to think that only weeks ago we were annoyed about writing an English paper or studying for that math test, when now it doesn’t seem all that bad. If we’ve learned anything from the never-ending weeks spent at home, it’s to cherish life’s true priorities and always appreciate the people around you.