It feels like there’s a great deal of contempt for the culture of seniors at South Brunswick High School: like seniors are for the most part equally untouchable and unteachable. The collective feeling is that the solidity to be expected of juniors and sophomores, not really freshmen, has diffused, resulting in a broad, murky, runny class of individuals who don’t really care about anything, are unable to care for anything, and do not want to care for anything. Not even for themselves through their education.
The senior anarchy, let’s call it, is a state freshmen tend to respect, sophomores and juniors to envy and look forward to respectively, and educators to despise. Now, to the credit of the contemptuous stereotype and those who perpetuate it, seniors materialize into this soupy residue only most of the time. The effects show up in different ways; some students take Fridays off every other week and others do not write anything for the Viking Vibe for a good month or so.
As for the teachers, I’ve heard reactions ranging from vigorously negative to somewhat neutral. A few have suggested shortening senior society even more, as some sort of resentful punishment that achieves absolutely nothing because they on their own admission don’t want to teach seniors anyway.
This type of knee-jerk reaction exemplifies a larger disconnect—a disconnect for the “mindless” seniors largely unconscious and for the educators largely conscious. One of the sides is in effective retirement after four—no, twelve—years of schoolwork and the other is a reactionary movement that comes around every year to a different set of individuals, and has in the process become as normalized as senioritis.
There, look, I said the word. That’s the word everyone was waiting for.
There are no new takes on senioritis because every year it’s the same. The seniors follow the natural law of slowly giving up and a reaction comes. That’s what everyone expects, so it’s what happens. It’s like the one image of the lion screaming at the monkey with his little monkey hand on his chin. It’s hard to say the contempt isn’t deserved a little, but it’s also funny how absolutely little seniors care about grades, and how much some teachers bother them over it anyway, knowing it’s a losing battle because they’ve lost it every year with every group of seniors they teach. Very few seniors consciously want to be rebellious but their default behavior is so rebellious that it causes pushback they don’t really comprehend. Grades no longer control them; they’ve been liberated, why are they even here?
Many of the annual senior festivities exist only to try and answer that question. Senior Skip Day and Prom House being the main ones—and of them I actually find a reactionary tendency as well. The grades, the numbers, they’re things, they’re achievements. The sorts of things you write on your college applications. The educational system encourages the doing of things: the achievement of grades, the acquisition of a perfect attendance record, the getting-into of a good college.
Conversely, senior skip day as a conscious choice of rebellion is in effect a rebellion against the way of things and a choice to lean towards people. Think of it this way: a senior can for the most part skip whenever they want, but senior skip day is its own thing. It’s communal. In a way it represents the confluence of the whole senior class into becoming one thing. What is to you a mindless liquid mass is actually the most solid representation of our identity we’ve had through all of school. For us, this is the closest thing we’ve ever had to that “collective solidity” you expected that wasn’t an illusion undermined by numbers and expectations. Take it or leave it.
The fact that adults hate it makes it better. It’s ours; sure, we can be mindless, if you want it, but it’s ours. And only we need to know it’s not mindless. Only we need to know that your system of things makes it so you cannot comprehend this. We’re all going to Long Branch, or New York, or bungee jumping, and we’re going to do it with our friends. You can take away senior society if you want, you can give us official punishments, you can try to make us socialize through toothless SELs, but you can’t take away our skip day because it’s ours. You go through your part in this every year and we go through it once. It’s the last part of real youth we have before we become like you—disconnected and reactionary.
