Call it a case of Junioritis-’24

Photo by Mitchell Chen

Junior Neal Malhotra catches some Z’s after a long night of playing brawl stars — he forgot to complete his history homework due that day.

We don’t know whether it’s because of school or the warm weather, but every day more and more juniors (including us) struggle to climb out of bed to go to school on time. 

We cram whatever is left on our desks from last night into our bags, eyes half closed, perhaps vibing to Katy Perry or Taylor Swift. We drive to school sleepily with our newly obtained licenses, trying not to crash into the slow-moving Saratoga parents. As we slowly ease into the parking lot, we see seniors seem to have caught the same condition: They too sluggishly stumble through the quad on the way to class.

At 8:30 a.m. or later, we finally make it to our first-period or second-period classes and soon find ourselves battling to stay awake (and hoping that this tardy doesn’t result in yet another Treasure Toga after-school work punishment. 

AP testing season is finally over (thank god!), our finals are finished, and we know which teachers we need to ask for letters of recommendation. For all intents and purposes the school year is over and we are now not-so-patiently waiting for the first day of summer vacation. 

AP classes are usually the toughest courses and take the most time out of our schedules, so it would be logical to assume that we don’t have much to do now that exams are over and would be able to sleep at 9 p.m. every night. Sadly, we still see ourselves sleeping at 2 a.m., watching trashy shows on Netflix, not doing the 15 minutes of homework assigned until morning and requesting our parents to please call us out sick. 

Now, the most difficult part of school is motivating ourselves to complete the end-of-the-year assignments that non-AP courses have. Most of us juniors are barely able to find the brain cells to function, let alone do homework — if our English teachers assign 30 pages of sleep-inducing reading to complete by next class, we’d be lucky to finish the second page. 

All that aside, we haven’t even talked about the hell that was AP testing. Many of us had to wake up at 6:30 a.m. (goodbye, two hours of sleep) to get ready for an APUSH exam, get to the school by 7:30 a.m., realize that none of the administrators were there, and stand in the cold until the doors finally opened at 8:30 a.m. And let’s not forget about the tests themselves, either. We’re supposed to remember so much information from the very beginning of the year that we forgot the minute we stepped out of class. Oops.

The worst part is the beautiful, tempting weather that shines in through our windows as we sit down to read “The Things they Carried,” which, we may add, is probably the most confusing and stress-inducing book of the year (take that, “Beloved!”). The scorching heat makes us just want to jump into a lake and swim for hours on end, only coming home when the sun sets. It should be a crime to keep us locked up in our rooms finishing the  homework we were assigned, and it doesn’t help that the school’s cinder block buildings make it feel like a prison.

Thankfully, summer break is just around the corner, which means doubling down on doing internships, volunteering, and taking outside classes (not to mention starting our college applications) any of us have a busy schedule this summer, but let’s make sure we get some much needed rest to help us push through our senior year, even if that rest started in mid-May.