By senior year, most students already had one foot out the door
June 16, 2010
By Spencer Newsad
So, I was a senior at Mount Si High School. It’s early June. I graduated on the 11th, and that’s all you really need to know about me.
Several weeks ago, most seniors had already shut down, tuned out and unplugged. We were coasting. It was too late to warn us that colleges don’t like senior-year slackers or that we should really start saving up money for when we move out … if we move out. (Hope we move out.)
Spencer Newsad
The truth, as I’m sure many have figured out by now, is that while parents were preparing for their sons’ and daughters’ senior year, they forgot that the job was already done. Our bags were packed and our ambitions and goals were set.
If we wanted to go to college, we would go to college; if we wanted to go out into the real world right away and make something of ourselves, we knew what we had to do; if we wanted to backpack across Europe … then, yeah, the plans probably fell through … but it’s the dream that counts, right?
And it’s not because we’re master planners or because we possess some sort of supernatural foresight.
It’s because you pointed us in a direction. Whether it was right or wrong, I don’t think it matters, because most of us are headed somewhere. If it’s straight into the ground, that’s beautiful, but one thing that our particular generation isn’t lacking is a plan.
We may not always be aware of the components and tools required to make it happen, but we could recognize the size and shape of it from a mile away.
You can scoff at the lunacy of my optimism, but it was only up until a decade ago that the slacker-lifestyle was in full bloom. Well, it’s been perfected now. They figured out how to exert as little energy as possible, yet still — impossibly — pull it together at the end.
We were trained by the best, so I expect that you are going to be really surprised when we finally do start pulling it together.
And here we are, eyes blazing, backs burning and voices blaring to the tune of a generation ready to do something.
And there you are, the community — and that is what you are — just as disapproving and grim and “conforming” as ever.
I’ll be one of the first to admit that we couldn’t do it without you. Not in a million years. Not even kinda’.
Just like you told us.
Thanks.
Spencer Newsad is a member of Mount Si High School’s Class of 2010. Comment at www.snovalleystar.com.
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