School Reminders

Back-to-school is always rough. If you’re like me, spending the summer on island time, the abrupt slide back into due dates and schedules and meetings is the worst. In the microcosm of school, there is always a pressure to be doing something productive at all times. But there are good parts about school too! I need to remind myself of these things sometimes to get out of bed, so maybe they’ll help you too.

Getting to see friends: This is the best part of school for me. I know that if I didn’t see most of my friends at school, I’d never see them. Think of how you feel when the people you talk to in a certain class are missing. They feel the same way about you when you’re missing!

Moving around: If left to my own devices, I would stay in my room all day, leaving only to eat. That’s not healthy. School makes you get out of the house, interact with people, learn new things, and get up and walk around. If you have gym class, that’s another opportunity to get some exercise in. 

Opportunities to be involved: At my school, the Activities Office claims that extracurricular activities are “the other half of education.” While I’m not necessarily joining clubs to educate myself, I know that I can learn practical skills from them that I can’t learn in a classroom. School activities are wide-ranging and usually very accepting. Even if you don’t take, say, a digital art class, you can still participate in an art club, a graphic design club, or make illustrations for the school newspaper.

It Ends: Even knowing the above three things are true, it can still be hard to make yourself go to school. School might seem endless, but every day, the dismissal bell rings. Every June, another class graduates. Every year, you have another summer vacation. Everything ends, even school. As I go into my senior year, there’s a lot of emphasis placed on “my last” everything.

But each of those “lasts” are only “my last” in high school. There will be so much more for me beyond high school that, in the grand scheme of things, I can’t worry too much about going to “my last” dance or picnic. There’s always more. There’s always another day. 

But you won’t know if you don’t go.

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What do or did you like about high school? Is or was there anything that got you through or even motivated you to go? How do you remind yourself that academics aren’t everything when it comes to school?