Although school is a place where people go to learn, it is a fact that most high school students, myself included, generally place more value in their test scores than in actual learning. These tests are, ironically, supposed to measure how much learning actually took place during the school year. No matter the mark, a good long summer break is all it takes to cure you of everything you’ve memorized.
The few things that really are important for our generation to learn, more than dusty old history facts, are rarely paid enough attention. Upon starting the Earth Sciences unit in my grade 10 science class, my teacher informed us that the climate chapter had been cut out of the curriculum. That seemed okay to me. Just a few less climagraphs, right? When I examined the skipped chapter out of curiosity, I found that it was mostly about climate change. Climate change, arguably the defining point of our future, replaced with notes on Pompeii.
If the really important things are left out, one might just decide it doesn’t matter. If I carry a calculator all the time, why would I need math? What use is learning how many lines are in a sonnet? Why shouldn’t I just guess all C’s on the multiple choice? I’ll just forget it all anyway. But this mindset gets us nowhere. Even if our education system is a bit flawed, we are so lucky to have the opportunity to learn history at all. Even if doesn’t seem too interesting at the time, chances are, at some point, we may need to do some trigonometry or compose a good essay.
After all of this ‘hard studying’, a break is definitely warranted. In fact, why not have two? Within four days of each other! Just when our two-week spring break ended, a long weekend is just the thing.
Easter came and went at LVR with a bit of a surprise: the always active leadership class who run school activities had placed caches of foil-wrapped eggs in classrooms all over the school. Needless to say, all of them had been hunted out by lunch, which was, conveniently, when the official Easter Egg Hunt began. Participants followed an obstacle course (quite literally) of clues leading all around the school and back to the gym. Winners received chocolate bunnies, and the rest had to console themselves with more of the aforementioned foil-wrapped eggs.
Two weeks of spring break have left students reluctant to get back into the rhythm of waking up early. We have all returned with vacation tans, or possibly pasty skin from all the time we spent indoors watching Netflix. And now that our alarm clocks are set again, people are casting their eyes to the next big chunk of time off: summer break. For everyone in grade 12, Grad 2015 is rapidly closing in.
