Does the coming of a break bring the mindset of exhaustion, or does exhaustion signal the need for a break?
Two weeks before break, I feel my body shutting down and the traditional sick feeling beginning in the lower ridges of my throat. An ache in my head begins and my body feels heavier each morning, as if stones line my blankets.
Do schools, through years and years of grueling torture and experimentation, know the limits of the teenage body and place school breaks appropriately? Or, do our bodies and minds know that a break is coming and anticipate it by prepping us for hibernation?
The strong hold it out until break and return rested and energized. The weak hold it out until break then proceed to get sick for 10 days. And return not so rested but strong enough for the next break.
My questions are; which of the theories is correct? Is this the right way to hold school? Is there even a right way?
Parts of the following blog are fictional accounts.
Tuesday
I’m always the first one back from breakfast, so the dorms are quiet and still. Halfway down the hallway, a drawing of a cartoon spider flutters to my feet from it’s position on the wall. It was an omen, I swear it was. There was a spider in the dorm’s cutlery drawer when I was looking for spoon to make hot chocolate with.
The girls went to bed that night feeling weary but quite hopeless. We all knew that the relentless torture would not ease up yet. “Third time’s the charm,” they say.
3am and the all-too familiar sound fills the dorm. I laid awake in bed for 20 seconds or so, contemplating just staying in my room and facing the consequences.
Apparently, I wasn’t the only one with that thought, as I was the first person out of the dorm. The other humans took their time coming out because they knew that there was no fire and no danger.
We’re all tired. We’re all bickering.
Wednesday
No sign of our 8-legged friends anywhere, so I felt internally relieved. The other girls felt hopelessly exhausted and didn’t have as much knowledge as I do.
All was quiet that night. Not a peep, not a ring, not a twitch.
Thursday
6:40am and I’m brushing my teeth, eyes still closed and dozing off in the silence. A friend screams and points to the wall – a large brown recluse, crouching and staring at me from the mirror. I bring him outside and try to calm my beating heart, now definitely awake.
There’s the cartoon spider at my feet again. I had stuck it back onto the wall on Tuesday, and today… Well, there it is.
9pm Thursday. I’m prepared for their final attack.
Friday
5am and I was woken by the smell of smoke. It was faint enough that the fire alarms didn’t go off.
There were about (aw heck no) a dozen spiders on my floor.
They all ran under the crack of my door and I followed them out into the hallway and out of the dorm. It was hot outside. Like, fiery hot. Actually, there was a huuuge fire outside the dorm that singed the edges of my tie-dye shirt and curled the ends of my braided hair.
The fire alarm finally went off but the dorm didn’t jump like it usually did.
Everyone was sick of the fire alarm. Every single one of them stayed in their beds and covered their ears and groaned. Nobody was awake enough to smell the smoke or to even bother to check the hallways, where smoke was coating the ceilings.
The dorm dogs ran outside silently, followed by a cat and several hundred more insects of all shapes and sizes.
I thought I was dreaming, which is why I only laughed and waved at the dorm.
As the day goes on, exhaustion starts to grow. Not that I’ve done anything besides sit around all day, but nonetheless, I feel exhausted.
It all happens unconsciously. I sit down next to two friends and then immediately memorize who’s sitting in the room with us. One, two, three, four, and then five adults. The boys take over the couches, and the girls weave around the snack tables.
The big game is showing on the TV, and I repeatedly flicker my eyes to the screen, keeping track of the score and any big plays that might have happened. There are also people outside playing ping-pong, and I try to mentally mark the people who are outside.
And while I’m so absorbed in the room, I’m also talking to the person to my left. The one that is so demanding of my attention, and I’m thinking about my inability to give it to him.
Photo cred; healthyplace.com
Because my mind and my senses are completely split, there is no way in bloody heck that I can ever pay attention to one thing and one thing only. My ears strain to hear the conversations on the couches and my eyes try to watch and make sure everyone is alright and okay. God knows why my mind just can’t settle down.
So now it’s the end of the day, but I don’t feel like I’m allowed to say “I’m exhausted” because I have literally done nothing but sit around all day.
The “epidemic” of our generation. Researchers or something have come up with the term “text neck,” which is a sort of condition you can get from texting. Symptoms include bad posture, neck and/or back pains, and can lead to spine degeneration and surgery.
Ooh technology, you’ve got us now!
Or do you?
See, I get “reader’s neck.” And “writer’s neck.” And “artist’s neck.” Oh, and “carving into tracing paper with a small, sharp knife neck.”
Oh look, no modern tech in this picture. That looks sooo comfortable, doesn’t it? I bet nobody lectures him about “scribe’s neck.”
I’m not saying that text neck doesn’t exist. I’m saying that maybe some things matter more than text neck.
How about the constantly hurting spine of the tall senior in a minuscule desk? Seriously, he looks like a titan in the desk.
Or perhaps the fact that there is almost literally no way to read a book comfortably on your bed. When I get into the story, I stop moving for hours. And then I “wake up” feeling like a ton of bricks had been stacked onto my neck.
How about I broaden this topic and say that probably everything we do is harming our body in some odd way? Yeah, let’s do that.
After attending Catholic preparatory school for the past two and a half years with a number of my closest friends, I never imagined I would have transferred to a quite liberal, low-key school with such a relaxed environment.
Because of the many negative experiences I had at such a strict and old-fashioned school, I decided that it was necessary to make a change in my academic life.
One of my best friends and her older brother advocated highly for the school they went to; Ojai Valley School. Sounds like some tiny, boring school in the middle of nowhere.
Boy was I wrong.
Photo Credit: thelavenderinn.files.wordpress.com
The second I arrived on campus for an interview with admissions, I was taken aback by the breathless view from the top of campus.
Not only can you see a majority of the Ojai Valley, but as I looked around I noticed the extent of beauty around and on campus. Horses grazing among the green, lush hills, the large and obviously eco-friendly solar panels that consume the top of a hillside, and the relaxed social environment.
This is my fourth year at Ojai Valley School, and I’ve taken an art class every year here. My freshman year I took Photography, and my sophomore and junior years I took Ceramics and Ceramics II. My senior year, this year, I recall signing up for a drawing class.
Never would I imagine that I would be put into AP Studio Art.
Yes, I may have had three years of art, but none of those three art classes involved hand-drawing anything. Now, in AP Art, we have to produce 24 art pieces to be put into our portfolio, which is a staple if you want to get into art school.
Which is not where I want to go. But I took it as a challenge and went with it anyways.
12 of the pieces are our Concentration, which is “a body of related works that demonstrate sustained and thoughtful investigation of a specific visual idea.” Basically 12 pieces of art related to one topic, such as drawing a 12-piece short comic.
12 of the pieces are our Breadth, “a variety of works demonstrating a range of conceptual and/or technical approaches.”
There’s more than just drawing with pencil and paper. There’s black charcoal, white charcoal, oil painting, oil pastels, color pencils, watercolor painting, things like that, and our Breadth section is basically us showing off what we can do in as many different ways as we can. (My favorite so far is white charcoal on black paper.)
Apart from “art” classes in elementary school, I’ve never taken art before, so since the beginning of the year, every time I sat down in our art studio, my first thought was always “I have no idea what I am doing.” To be honest, I still don’t know what I’m doing.
But that’s alright, I guess. Most of us don’t know what we’re doing there anyways.
However enjoyable Ojai Valley School is, by the time a break rolls around, I am more than ready for some time off. The longest stretch is from the start of school to Thanksgiving break, and with that break in a week, I’ve almost made it through.
At the beginning of the year, I’m filled with motivation, and I’m sure that I’ll make it through the year easily. However, at this time of the year, I’m dragging along, barely getting my work done.
It’s not just me though, which is why a break is much-needed. Teachers have been piling on the work lately, so students are overwhelmed, and aren’t doing as well. Luckily, if we make it through this last week, we will have reached the reward.
Although Thanksgiving break is only a week, it will be rejuvenating. I’m grateful that I get to go home and see my friends, as well as sleep in my own bed. Short and sweet, and I’m looking forward to it.
No but seriously – I’m very much lost when it comes to my future. Today, my mom asked me to come watch something in her room. Given the last thing she showed me was a video of a baby otter learning to swim, I was willing to submit. Instead, she showed me an ABC feature on college admissions.
My entire life has been geared towards my future, and more importantly, college. My parents sent me to a specific preschool because it had a high matriculation to the special elementary school I attended, which had an even higher matriculation to the prestigious middle and high school I then went to. This high school is world-renowned for its spectacular college matriculation – the reason my mother was so intent on me attending. I was so absorbed with college from a young age that I didn’t even think of what comes afterwards.
Now at a different kind of school, I am faced with a shocking change of attitude. Where I am now, college is not the main focus. It is mentioned occasionally during meetings, but the announcements are geared towards seniors, seldom juniors, and almost never sophomores or freshmen. Although I know this is the norm through most schools, I can’t help but feel lost, and even insecure.
When I went to my old school, all of the focus on college was basically done for me. College was a given – everyone thought about it all the time. It was such a recitation that I didn’t even really think about it. But here, I have to independently think about my own future without anyone prompting me. That’s the strange part that I am not used to, and it’s where the trepidation comes in.
Before now, I never thought about what I want to go to college for, and what I want to do after. It’s such a classic teenage cliché – “Where am I going, what am I doing?” I’ve never really thought about it until now, and I’m really at a loss. I have no idea what I want to do when I’m older – be a writer maybe, but of course, that’s a tough choice. Whenever I say this when people ask, they laugh in my face. I guess I don’t really know where I’m going.
All these new concerns have arisen now because someone very close to me is going through the college process, and is feeling a bit of what I’m feeling – second guessing their given goals and really thinking about the future. I want to get a head start on these decisions, so I’m not as stressed out later. But that is a curse as well as a blessing, because I am feeling the senior stress now as a sophomore.
I can masterfully edit a college essay so it fits exactly what a classic admissions officer is looking for, I can recite the top 10 schools in the world, and I can rattle off expected SAT scores and the times and number of questions in every section of the test. What I can’t do, however, is figure out what I want. And that’s something that I really should know by now. Maybe the constant college preparation hasn’t aided me, it has just brainwashed me. I can help everyone else think about college and prepare, but I can’t help myself.
Hi, people. I’m writing a book right now. I’ve gotten about 16 pages done — aren’t you proud? Here’s a chapter. Hopefully you can read all of them next year, maybe even in a published book.
8-
I am running.
Footfall after footfall, the black street disappears behind me as a I fly through the night.
Out of breath, I whip my head around. They are still following me, almost about to catch me.
The game soon becomes a chase, similar to how a cheetah chases a gazelle.
I hop over logs, stumbling but righting my balance. I launch forward onto my hands and swing my legs up and over my body. This sets them off a few paces.
I continue running.
This is true freedom.
Fighting for my survival, fighting to win, to be safe. The wind passes through my hair and keeps it upright behind me.
I do not slow down.
They are laughing, stumbling, trying to catch up. We are all full of pancakes, bacon, eggs. It is slowing them down.
I keep going, ignoring the sharp pain in the bottom of my stomach.
I turn a corner, taking it like a race car, slanting so far down that I am almost parallel to the grass on the side of the street.
I am aware of everything around me – the gas station on the corner, the yogurt store across from it, the three boys behind me, my white converse hitting the ground.
When I decided to go to boarding school, I think I had some idea that it would be just like going to Hogwarts. In some ways, it is.
At OVS, we have prefects- just like the stuck up Percy Weasley, Gryffindor prefect. We also have all school games, just like Quidditch. The one thing we are missing? Houses.
In Harry Potter, there are four houses- Slytherin, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff, and Gryffindor. Students are sorted into these houses based on personality traits, and the houses compete throughout the year to win the House Cup. Points toward this goal are earned through good deeds and conduct. Points are deducted when students are insolent or insufficient.
I think that OVS should try having houses as well. It seems like a fun way to get involved with the school, as well as a good way to make friends. It would also promote good behavior without an overwhelming sense of discipline.
I also wouldn’t complain if OVS acquired some flying broomsticks or owls as well. Just saying.
in the lower ridges of my throat. An ache in my head begins and my body feels heavier each morning, as if stones line my blankets.
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