With my second semester of senior year approaching, I feel as if I am expected to lose interest in my classes and to leave my textbooks in a corner to see how much dust they can collect. While I have been incredibly busy this year and feel like I deserve a break, during my three and a half years spent at this school, I have come to the conclusion that senioritis does not exclusively affect seniors.

Every time I hear stereotypes about seniors, it seems as if teachers and underclassmen alike assume they are slackers. However, I have worked harder during first semester of senior year than I have in previous years, and I’m already the type of person who can’t sleep at night without having finished my homework. Because of this, I have not experienced the effects of senioritis yet. I’m sure that many other seniors have also worked hard on college apps and schoolwork, so the merciless opinion that the rest of the school population has of seniors could not possibly be referring to first semester.

Frankly, I would say that the rest of the school is not innocent in this regard either; senioritis affects other members of the WJ population.  I have, of course, never been a teacher, but I have been an underclassman, and each year I came down with a strain of senioritis. I started to get sick of my classes at different times each year. The desire to end the school year and alter my increasingly monotonous daily schedule is not new to me. All of the underclassmen who think of seniors as bored slackers are probably feeling the same way as them, but are just reluctant to admit it. Or, these underclassmen may be healthy but about to experience the same symptoms of slacking, daydreaming and laziness. 

I’m sure that at least some teachers also acquire senioritis at some point. In the spring, it gets warm outside and a feeling of revival floods the earth, but there are only a few different ways to teach class, and teaching probably gets tiring by second semester. After all, who could handle the same annoying students month after month? The end of the school year often melts into days of watching movies and YouTube and participating in off-topic discussions. At some point, I think all of us, or at least most of us, get sick of waking up each morning and making our way to school.

I’m not saying this to propose that we are all failures in some way or to suggest that underclassmen are just as lazy as seniors; I am just alerting you to be on the lookout for certain symptoms that could show that you too are succumbing to the inevitable disease. Also, if you do show signs of senioritis, remember that senioritis is not always a bad thing; it can sometimes, in fact, be entertaining. When you find yourself hoping for a snow day in May, counting the tiles on the ceiling or realizing that your notes are not written in English, just remember that seniors are not the only ones with senioritis. Once you realize this, hopefully you will be more understanding of them in the future.

So, don’t think that seniors must abide by stricter standards than the rest of the population. They are not required to be act differently or be more interested in school than those in other classes. Ultimately, the only significant difference between underclassmen and seniors is that, given that they will be moving to college next year, seniors will be freshmen again in the near future.