It
’s that time of year again. The Holidays. The holidays bring so
many people joy every year. During the break, it is a wonderful
time for students and teachers to catch up on some much deserved
sleep.
It’s that time of year again. The Holidays. The holidays bring so many people joy every year. During the break, it is a wonderful time for students and teachers to catch up on some much deserved sleep.
During the holiday season we prep for Christmas when our families come to visit and eat our food. And we prep for New Year’s eve. But for most high school students there is one more thing to get ready for. No, it’s not another holiday. It’s far from that in fact. It’s he meanest thing that Live Oak can do to us. Two weeks after we get back from break, we get to tale final exams for the first semester. Yea! (sarcasm).
These are the times that you see teenagers growing gray hairs. There is no way to get out of finals and no way to ensure we will still have our sanity when we are through with them. But there could have been a better way to schedule finals. Instead of having finals after break, they could have been before break. Many of my friends who attend other high schools had finals before break and are no longer worried about their final exams.
It might seem like having break before finals is a good thing, but actually I believe that it is not. It totally ruins our break. I would prefer to not even think about school during my break. If I think about school at all it should be about how I can improve next semester, not studying. I’m not saying that studying is a bad thing, but really, who wants to study during their relaxing break?
After we finish finals during the spring we have summer vacation. So, why not have a break in between all finals. It splits things up a bit and would make the year seem little shorter.
Some families annually go out of state to spend the holidays with their family. What are those student supposed to do about studying. But who can study with your whole family in the same house. It seems unreasonable. But if you have to study, I guess you can find a way to block out great Aunt Greda’s laughter.
If the school planned finals after break thinking that we would spend some of it studying then our teachers could have at least given us some clue about what exactly to study for instead of me asking them privately. And even then, some of them either weren’t at school before break or they weren’t sure what the final was going to look like yet.
Even if every one knew what to study and they studied during the break, we still have a week of class left. It seems so random to have two weeks of school before finals. One of those weeks is called “dead week. “Dead week” is a time for teachers to review with the students and for us, the students, to study.
The school I attended previous to Live Oak during my freshman and sophomore years didn’t take a week to review with their students. Yes, we reviewed in class, but it wasn’t so official like Live Oak. Though I have to say that some teachers can never fit all the ciriculum before dead week, so they improvise.
Last year I had a teacher who told us that he didn’t have time to go over the last chapter with us, so we had to learn it on our own and know it on the final. That was not fair at all. The point of a final is to test students on what was taught in class by the teacher, not by what couldn’t be fit in. It’s things like this that make finals all the more stressful.
Stressful is the only word I know to describe finals. They are stressful to all high school students, but especially seniors. We want to get into our choice colleges and universities. But in order to do that we must pull the grades. I know so many students, including myself, who annually get sick during finals week. It’s awful to feel physically ill and still have to fully comprehend the questions on the final.
It becomes even worse for those who have test anxiety. Many students struggle with their mental attitude when taking tests. We all know that our mental attitude is key when taking tests and those who go into tests overly nervous, and full of anxiety even if they actually know the material. That’s not to say that studying doesn’t help either.
I suppose what I am getting at here is that the way that finals are scheduled at Live Oak is a bit of an inconvience to students.
But I suppose I should be grateful because none of my teachers assigned huge projects to do over the break. In past years, I have had teachers that seemed to take joy in knowing we would be slaving in front of a computer writing comparative essays and doing research projects. They said it was to keep our minds thinking. I don’t buy that.
