It starts slowly: One day, you begin to grow disinterested with class. You get on your phone, maybe to check Instagram or TikTok. “It’s just a peek,” you think. You lose the time. Class is over and you don’t know what you were learning about. “It’s probably not important though,” you say, continuing on with your day. Over time it starts to grow. You lose track of assignments, homework, tests, it all fades from your memory, the phrase, “I’ll do it later,” plaguing your mind. Eventually, you look at your grades, and with your heart beating hard in your chest, you feel something is wrong. Now you see it: You just got an “F.” You ask your teacher to allow you to turn in your late work for partial credit, but it’s already too late…
If you or a loved one have ever experienced something like this, you’re not alone, and there is hope. You just had a brush with a terrifying disease,a disease called “Senioritis.” Senioritis is a colloquial term that refers to the lack of motivation for school that many students face within their last year of high school, and especially their last semester. For some people, it’s small, but for others, it can become a very real problem, with some people even losing the motivation to come to school entirely.
One person who has experienced Senioritis, senior Aiden Analla, has struggled with being unmotivated to finish his schoolwork for years, but now that the end seems so close, senioritis has set in to a more drastic degree. Analla hopes to become a personal trainer and to help people reach their fitness goals, however, Senioritis may stand in the way of his college career.
“I feel like part of it is being drained from, you know, 12 years of going to school, so it’s just like you’re getting to a point where you’re tired of it and you just want to be done,” Analla said. “I feel like I am lowering my expectations to a point where I’m not holding myself accountable to do my work as I should be, and that’s probably not too great for what I plan to do in my future.”
The future of someone who has contracted Senioritis can, at times, be uncertain. Sometimes, the symptoms of Senioritis will last only a little while. Sometimes, they may last until highschool graduation, and in the worst cases, Senioritis may even last until college graduation. However, the onset of it is generally common, usually starting when people get news that their college choice has accepted them, as senior Hailey Early has experienced.
“Man, I don’t want to do my work, like, I’ve already been accepted into a place that I wanna go. I just need to graduate and get out of here.” Early said. “It’s gotten especially bad when it comes to turning in my AP Lit homework because we’ve been doing poems for the past three weeks, and I’ve been doing them, but I’ve been procrastinating. I’m doing them right now in this class because I have lit next hour. Oh boy, I’m cooked.”
However, contracting Senioritis is not the end of the world for someone academically. Through a process colloquially known as “locking in,” someone can temporarily delay the symptoms of Senioritis, and in some cases, even cure it. “Locking in” usually happens when a very large project is due extremely soon in a class that would completely alter the grade of the student, or when a student’s parents threaten to take away certain privileges until a grade rises in a class. The sudden rush of urgency and importance of the grade can cause a person to shake their symptoms and find the motivation to finish their work.
Senior Truman Schoenholz, was struggling with finishing his Spanish homework, but with the deadline for late work quickly approaching, Schoenholz “locked in.”
“I had like seven missing assignments, but the number is only, like two right now, I’m almost there. I’m almost caught up,” Schoenholz said. ”If you think about how bad it’s gonna be if you don’t do it, if you don’t do your work, then it might motivate you to actually do it with a reasonable amount of time.”
During this time of year, it’s important to remember that it’s not over yet. The fight must continue for only a few more months. Colleges can and will still decide they won’t accept you if you let yourself go too much, so don’t contract Senioritis, and if you do, lock in.
