Like many of my classmates, I can safely say that my senioritis goes way back—maybe even as far as the end of junior year. But I would argue it doesn’t stem from a lack of academic motivation. If anything, looking ahead at college and the multitude of courses and pathways it has to offer has only gotten me more excited about the subjects I enjoy. But that doesn’t erase the fact that I’ve found my drive to engage and perform for this school increasingly depreciated and almost at a breaking point.
I must confess that my senioritis is East-specific, and I’d like to use the platform of my last-ever column for the ECHO to deconstruct why.
It’s with a complex range of emotions that I begin this narrative, because I have many reasons to remember this school fondly and to be energized by the opportunities I’ve encountered here. This was the place where I contributed to the production of a literary magazine for four years, where I discovered “Crime and Punishment” by accident through a criminal justice project for Lang, where I made a graphic novel poster for another one of my favorite books that I have hanging up in my bedroom.
But I want to travel back in time to the online school scene at the beginning of my freshman year, when I was in the process of moving to Chapel Hill from the Wake County Public School System in Raleigh. East’s notoriously competitive culture was foreign and unknown to me from behind a screen. I was lucky enough not to have parents or other adults in my life pushing me to think about college when I was 14, so it was one of the last things on my mind. Instead, I was writing plays for my friends and I. I was dipping my feet in languages on Duolingo and trying to figure out three-octave scales on the violin.
I was excited about the prospect of high school courses, but at the same time, I also didn’t know there was a course book online. I didn’t know that East was an AP school and not an IB school, like the one I would’ve attended in Raleigh. All I got at the beginning of the year was a brief phone call with my counselor, who walked me through most of the ordinary freshman courses and registered me accordingly. I wasn’t presented with any of that information until the time of junior year registration, and it was not presented through administration, but through my classmates.
I never fully understood what was meant by “East academic culture” until I saw, over and over again, my peers comparing their course loads, reciting their standardized test scores, and talking about the Common App as early as freshman year. I came from a world where you didn’t talk about your grades or scores. Those things constituted a private world between me, my parents and my computer screen. My elementary and middle school experiences were anything but utopian, but for the most part, I could count on the fact that if my friends and I were going to talk about a class, we discussed only the material.
My peers’ unyielding fixation on each other’s stats has given rise to a near-death of any relevance to academic material in the classroom and beyond. I was amazed, and continue to be amazed, with the way I’ve seen it affect clubs and extracurriculars. If an activity isn’t something that offers service hours, state and national contests, or some other quantification of academic rigor, the engagement will tumble by incredible margins. And this goes for classes, too, no matter how they’re weighted. I almost never hear conversations about my AP classes that have to do with whichever topics we’re covering in them, be it “Hamlet” or confidence intervals. I mostly hear ones about the FRQ or essay rubric and how to most efficiently knock out our current assignment, often at the expense of blurring the lines around academic integrity.
And in the midst of this sea of striving, struggle and comparison, seldom does anyone pause and ask themselves: why is it that I find myself in a position to take these classes, some of which may interest me genuinely, and some of which I’m taking for the sake of their appearance on my transcript? What does that say about my priorities and the priorities of those who I allow to influence me? And most crucially, what does that say about my privileges?
Instead, we allow our social environment to perpetuate a very typical American, pioneer-like illusion of a meritocracy, knowing full well that this school and this district faces an opportunity gap so large that it’s comparable to segregation. Instead of looking at those statistics and acknowledging that the courses and activities we find ourselves involved in are, at least to some extent, a reflection of our degree of affluence and establishment, we look the other way and continue to be absorbed in the dominant culture of our social strata. If this is the case and we know it is the case, why do we still give so much weight to these numbers tied to our names?
It’s this ongoing dynamic that lies at the root of my waning energy for East and its academic climate. I want to make it abundantly clear that this is not a preaching attempt. If it were, it would be one founded in hypocrisy, because I’ve plummeted down many of the social pitfalls I’ve just described from sheer desperation, insecurity and pressure over the years. Those pitfalls and the impression of their necessity have taken their toll on me as I know they have on others. I end this column in hopes that it will ignite something, somewhere, in someone and through that, I will be able to pass on a torch of awareness, understanding and capacity for action towards the future of this school.
