Is second-semester burnout real?

In a 2018 column for the Psychopharmacology and Substance Abuse Newsletter, Dr. Elizabeth Holly defines academic burnout in three distinct areas: physical and emotional exhaustion, feelings of inefficiency and lack of personal accomplishment.

While it is typically associated with college students, this fatigue is an all-too-familiar feeling for countless high school students; in competitive environments like Saratoga High’s, it often takes a toll on even the youngest students on campus.

Freshman Anouk Yeh is the president of the Leos Club, an avid member of the speech and debate team, a member of the MACLA Slam Poetry team, a horseback rider for the Stanford Red Barn IEA team and Charlebois Farm, a teacher at Silicon Valley Youth and a volunteer at a special-needs day care center, Angel Love. On top of all that, she is a dedicated student.

“I feel like in the beginning of the year, everyone is motivated to get back to school, get good grades and ace all their classes,” Yeh said. “But once second semester starts, trying your best all the time gets pretty tiring.”

Now, Yeh finds herself more frequently taking longer naps before getting to her schoolwork: a habit she didn’t have near the start of the school year.

Senior Katie Hulme — who was recruited to play volleyball for Emory University as a junior — said she has experienced a similar but slightly different situation.

Hulme had to fight an earlier onset of “senioritis” in the beginning of second semester of junior year. However, as a senior, she realizes the dangers of falling too far behind.

“There are definitely seniors who accept that they can get worse grades,” Hulme said.

Hulme strives to maintain the good grades she has worked hard for throughout her high school career. To Hulme, pride in her own abilities prevents her from slacking too far behind coursework.

“It's more just my personal standards,” Hulme said. “I want to keep doing as well as I can especially since I need to prepare for college doing pre-med. I’m still going to have to study a lot so if I lose my work ethic this year it won’t help me for college.”

This sentiment falls in line with what Precalculus, Calculus, and Statistics teacher Jennifer Mantle believes high school students should keep in mind, especially seniors who face possible rescission for falling too far behind.

“That’s the biggest bummer of the whole planet,” Mantle said. “It doesn’t mean that that student didn’t go to college, they just didn’t go to a college they really wanted to go to because they didn’t make some good choices.”

Through “verbal cheerleading,” “veiled threats of failure” and her signature reminder to not “fall off the bandwagon,” Mantle hopes to encourage students, especially less motivated seniors, to stay on track. She believes although second semester seniors face an “emotional tornado,” senioritis is a mental construct that people like to throw around.

Mantle believes Saratoga students face different stressors that contribute to a different type of burnout than what she saw at Lincoln High School in San Jose, where she taught for nine years.

“It was more like ‘Can I get kids to graduate?’ and get them to pass and earn their high school credits,” Mantle said about teaching at Lincoln High School.

Here, Mantle sees cultural and familial pressure to become an Ivy-League student lead to the problems.

“It’s harder to let go of some of those stresses because everyone else is on that train and then you feel like if you’re not on that train you should be on it,” Mantle said. She hopes her students keep in mind that high school is only the beginning.

“While academics are important, it’s also important to be a kid,” Mantle said. “There’s a whole huge life in front of you. There’s a lot of different ways to live a really, really fruitful life.”