Our senior year is falling short of that of what our parents, teachers, and siblings experienced. We have to get up every morning, and instead of getting all dressed up to go to school and get our morning Dunkin or Starbucks, we sit at the same desk and in front of the same computer for five hours a day. 

Many people look at this and think that “They have it easier! All they have to do is show up.” Those people, on the surface level, are right. It is easy, and we should have a 4.0 GPA because all we have to do is log in and do our work. What people miss is that the seniors this year have lost so much, and the same people that empathize with us are the same people that hound us to just keep our heads down and do everything right.

Remote learning is exhausting, not by the content or the time commitment, but because we don‘t have a variety of what our day is. Senior Maddie Enman said, “It’s nice that I get to sleep in some days, but it’s also kind of draining sitting on the computer for like, hour and a half for each class.” Seniors lost the meaningless rule-breaking, the Friday night lights, the poking fun at underclassmen, our last homecoming that we would have made fun of, the traditional competitions like Hunt for the Cure and Ram Jam that make GCHS different from any other school. There is no distinction between a senior and a sophomore right now. We are doing the same things every day with the exception of a different class load.

We are dealing with all of the stresses of being a senior and applying to go to college with most of us never seeing our college in person, and it seems that we have to do this by ourselves. Our teachers are there for us and they have been doing a great job. Senior Maddie Enman said, “There’s been a couple of teachers, like Chierico, that have really made a big [impact]”. 

That’s not to say that there haven’t been shortcomings because seniors are still at home and teachers are a face on a screen. We miss the one on one interaction with our teachers and counselors. Long gone are the days when if you were having a bad day that you could just walk into the guidance department and talk. Now, there are many hoops you have to jump through just to get them on a Zoom, and then with technical difficulties, as a likely possibility, it just isn’t the same. Teachers that once were hard on deadlines, now are accepting late work that has been dated back to the beginning of the semester. Senior Thomas Hinkley said, “I turned my stuff probably two months late, but I have an A in the class because he didn’t take off late points.” This on the surface level is great, but it plays into the seniors being unmotivated and procrastinating. Whereas in past years students had to be on top of their work to keep a good grade. 

The administrators have been doing as much as they can to keep us on track and not let us fall behind, but the truth is it feels like we’re doing this for nothing. Associate Principal for Student Services Mike Przybylski said, “It’s like Groundhog Day, every single day. It’s not good, so I don’t fault kids for falling behind.”

 We have all been trying to keep our hopes up in a world where it feels like the only thing we can count on is being let down. You had a world that was on fire, then a pandemic that is affecting millions of people, when do we catch a break? We, seniors, are expected to be adults and do adult things when in reality, we still feel like juniors. Not getting to see lacrosse captains from last year on their last trip to wherever in the country, their last team dinner, their last practice, and the constant goofiness that surrounded last year’s senior class. The juniors were just thrown into the leadership position that being a senior is without having closure on what a senior should have to live up to.

We no longer can have the nine senior ditch days that have no point, other than fun. We no longer can give our teachers headaches from us being loud and obnoxious in class, now they can just mute us. We as a school have been trying our best to fix what the world has done to students, and they should get praised for that, but in a pandemic that keeps taking everything that seniors look forward to, we seniors will lose hope, motivation, and commitment when it feels like we constantly get hope, and it is so abruptly taken away.

When the quarantine started we, like any other kid in the country, were excited for an extra two weeks of spring break and then some, but then the pandemic got real. Now, here we are, nine months later, still in our remote learning phase just trying to finish this semester off strong. Next time you see a student exhibiting senioritis, it’s not that they don’t care; it’s a loss of hope, a loss of drive, and a loss of everything that they looked forward to as a senior. So instead of meeting it with an iron fist, try meeting it with empathy and compassion as we seniors have it much different from you.