So Under Pressure

Once teenagers hit their junior year, the excitement of graduation begins to hit and the walls seem to close in. Now that it is spring, these juniors wish that it was them getting to walk across the stage in a couple of weeks. They want the stress and pressure to end and the pleasures of enjoying summer to come quickly. However, these people still have another year of high school, and its anticipation will prove to be even worse than the years before. Junior year is the hardest year for most teenagers because they have to maintain good grades for college applications and they must still try very hard in all high school aspects. All of these dimensions seem to cause many juniors serious stress and anticipation for their senior year to come rapidly.

Junior year is the year when teachers begin to ask you where you are going to go to college. Teenagers are pressured to challenge themselves so that they can get into a satisfactory school; relying on the standardized tests required. We have to take the ACT, SAT, and multiple AP classes so that we can not only get accepted into a good college, but so we can already start getting a head start on college credits. Call us crazy, I know. Some teenagers can withstand the pressure, others are geniuses and simply don’t have to try, but some try their hardest and find themselves crumbing as the walls come down.

Lately, I have found myself doing exactly this. The homework just continues to add up and before I have finished with my two history projects, I have two more papers to write. Teachers are worried about not fitting everything into the school year, so they begin to throw in assignments in huge bundles. Not only do the students suffer from this homework, it just proves ineffective in teaching us anything at all. For me, I feel very pressured to keep my grades high and mighty. As the work adds up I still need to make time for studying for my AP tests and working on my newspaper jobs; I just wish that there was more than twenty four hours in a day. Being able to turn the clock back a couple hours, once or twice a week would be very beneficial in helping thousands of teenagers across the United States.

Coping with a situation like this is not very easy either. I won’t be able to relax until the first day of summer hits and the final bell has rung. There are still 32 days of turmoil left to live through and it seems more and more impossible to do so as days go on. Next year, the juniors will be seniors and it will be their turn to graduate from high school. Their year will be filled with excitement and the common concept of senioritis. But the new juniors will then be up for the stress and pressure of the eleventh grade. The cycle will continue, junior year will always be challenging, and there will always be people who tend to crack under all of the pressure.