With summer finally at the end, many of us are filled with different emotions on going back into school. 

As for me, my feelings are more confused than they have ever been. Many others, including myself, are going into our senior year of high school. It’s time for us to receive that little piece of paper that tells us that it is time for us to enter into the “real world.” These past few years have been brand new experiences; all due to the infamous Covid 19. 

Nothing has been too normal since 2020. For the class of 2023, covid came in during our freshman year. With our first year cut short we never got to experience the full experience of our freshman year. No spring sports, no excitement for the possibility of going to our first prom, and of course not really truly learning what we were supposed to in our third trimester. Now, moving onto our sophomore year, this year was also far from normal. It took about half of the school year to get to “normal.” Many things were restricted from the beginning. Fall sports weren’t the same and neither were the school dances. Learning and school over all was still on a back track; with many still getting covid and the administration trying to find the safest way to return all the students back onto campus. From switching to A-B days and one week off – one week on. The class of 2023 had yet to experience one full normal year of high school. 

Our first official year of high school was junior year. Now, if you were to ask any of the upperclassmen what year is the hardest out of the four, I bet they would say junior year. For many students, junior year is the year that they begin to take many of the harder classes. Ranging from Human Anatomy & Physiology, college algebra and trig, etc.  With this in mind, as well as this being our first full year of high school; I think it’s safe to say that many of us struggled. 

With Covid putting a pause on freshman year and a buffer on sophomore year many of the students in the class of 2023 were not used to high school. I mean sure we knew what we were slightly doing but when it came to education we simply lacked. Those first two years were supposed to prepare us in our study habits to then help us with one of the hardest years: junior year. In the height of covid us high schoolers and many other students learned how to do things halfway, yet still gain points, grades, etc, fully. With covid ruining many of our study habits, and most educators allowing us to have this leniency. The class of 2023 was now at a place where we became quite lazy in our study habits. We expected no backlash on turning things in late or being questioned when we weren’t doing our best. Because for the most part, that became the new normal. Of course no one is to blame; this was a brand new experience for everyone.  

Lets travel back to junior year for the class of 2023. Our first ever FULL year of highschool, everything was finally back to normal. Sports were in full swing throughout the whole year, classes were filled and the halls were packed as ever. Not a single event was canceled or pushed back. What a breath of fresh air. Even with those put into place, something was still off…Having covid take away two years of high school and jumping straight into our junior year wasn’t very fun. We were expected to have our academics and learning habits to fall right into place just like how everything else seemingly had. Not only were we expected to be perfectly back to how we were before covid, we expected that from ourselves. Many of us had an expectation going into high school; an expectation that would have been reached by the end of our four years. But those four years were cut short by two. 

Coming from a personal level, I couldn’t help but to always have the small thought of “This is my first year of high school, yet I’m graduating next year.?” To the class of 2023- We’re graduating and we’ve only had one full year of high school. Our first year was our hardest, and the second will be our last. I know we should be quite grateful considering what the class of 2020 and 2021 had gone through. At least we’ll get a normal last year and have events that the class of 2020 couldn’t have. 

Even with all of these pros, the graduating class of 2023 has only really learned how to do things halfway. When trying to do things fully we struggled; all due to those two years that were taken away from us. Now, I’m sure more than anything that we will eventually get the hang of things that we were supposed to learn during our first two years of high school. Including those study habits and, of course, the responsibility of doing things to full extent and if/when we don’t do said item in its entirety, we can not always expect leniency. I’m not saying that everyone in the class of 2023 has done things half way, or struggled. But when talking to the class of 2023 many of us would wait until the last minute to do their work and even their best when it came to studies.

When gaining our high school diploma only within two years and not quite doing things to its full extent I can’t help but think that this may continue into the future. Of course this isn’t defining any of us, as you know so many people change once getting out of high school. The thought of this actually having an effect in our lives outside of school can be concerning. If there’s one thing that our four years has taught us is that we can do things half way and still prove that we did it fully. Maybe, there may be a chance that we will do only half of everything the rest of our lives. All because of the infamous Covid 19. 

To the graduating class of 2023: We got this… Hopefully.