Teachers encourage second semester seniors to stay focused

Senior Aayush Gupta finally feels like he’s free. He’s doing his homework and test studying “at the last second,” and dabbling in new activities like photography and modeling.

“I’m just chilling in the last few months before I go to college,” senior Aayush Gupta said. “I’ll do whatever, like attending concerts or going ham on balling.”

But students like Gupta — who was accepted to MIT via its Early Action program — still face a lingering threat if they slack too much: getting rescinded. Falling completely off track and bombing all their tests can get them kicked out of the very school which offered them a spot in their incoming freshman class.

Although these such occurrences are relatively rare at Saratoga High, they have occurred in the past.

“Getting rescinded is real,” AP Statistics teacher Jennifer Mantle said. “I have had students get rescinded from their top college for not having appropriate grades in AP Stats. They still went to college, just not their first choice for their first year.”

To try and prevent this frightening possibility from becoming real, some teachers have come up with ways to try and convince seniors to keep up with their work and stay engaged in class. For example, Mantle sets a clear schedule of the coursework and the expectations for the second semester.

All of her seniors receive a new “contract” that they must bring home detailing their academic responsibilities as second-semester seniors, as well as the risks of failing to fulfill them.

“I ‘encourage’ them to not fall off the wagon — not in a threatening way, but just in a real and honest way,” Mantle said.  “I try to make it fun and do a variety of activities when I can. But in the end, I remind students that it’s their responsibility to stay afloat.”

Although the passion and spirit of some seniors have subsided, some teachers have still seen a mixture of attitudes. The freedom of the last few months of high school can be a double-edged sword.

English teacher Jason Friend thinks the second semester is a valuable opportunity for seniors — saying they have a chance to learn without having to obsess about the race into college or worry about whether taking an intellectual risk will earn them a B+ rather than an A.

That said, some seniors choose to take the other path and stop learning, Friend noted. They stop doing their work just because they have nothing to do it for, essentially wasting the precious moment.

“When this happens, I find it quite sad,” Friend said, “since it suggests that those students really have been so caught up in the ‘rat race’ to college mentality that the only thing that motivates them is jumping through hoops to get to the next thing, rather than actually being authentically intellectually curious.”

Gupta agrees that he now has an extra opportunity to learn something new in second semester, but he noted that the opportunity does not necessarily have to increase academic knowledge. He hopes to try out new things things, liking sneaking into random classes, and pick up the old skills that they dropped as they entered high school.

“I think the freedom to gamble with my grades and the freedom to do crazy things and get away as just a dumb kid has made me more able to go out of my way to pursue crazy or fun things I really want to try,” Gupta said.