Confessions Of A Student Who Can No Longer Give A Shit

The downside of your Robotics teacher being gone three class periods in a row is you can't get back the rough sketch you turned in, thus you can't actually proceed further on the project you're already behind on. My counselor is also supposed to call me out this period, but if history's shown me anything, I'm gonna actually be given time to finish this blog post (Now that I think about it, I was too lazy to email her and I merely filled out a slip at the office. I'll tell her at lunch, then, should I see her). Now, music, anyone?

So, my issues as of late? My grades are dying due to my lack of motivation to do any work whatsoever, due in turn by an emotional breakdown I had Thursday of last week. The breakdown didn't have anything to do with my dad. I merely visualized all the homework I had to do (and that's the stuff I'm not behind on) after vowing to finish it all, then broke down and tried not to cry, instead seeking distraction from my pain due to electronic devices. I've brought up that Louis C.K. video in the past, where he talks about how kids can't cope with the pain of everyday life, and so have to go on a texting spree where they might end up killing people due to them currently driving.

Anyways, I tried to blog about said breakdown last week and failed horribly, because I couldn't rationalize it. Sometimes when I write, I need to wait, I need to face my pain and understand it before I can write about it. What I did on that draft post was mere venting to relieve the stress I was facing. The music in my ears pulling me away from the post instead of dragging me further in as usual. I was still within the midst of a sea of pain, and I had to swim to shore before I wondered why the hell my ship sank. (hint, I'm going to need a bigger boat)

In the background, you can see my grades, about to devour me and drag me down into the depths of McCallum.

Mainly it was due to physics. The intense workload, with the take home tests our teacher qualifies as homework for some reason, drove me further from my initial enthusiasm for physics and the AP exam than video games and TV shows ever could. The public school system tends to behave like a vampire, draining the students' enthusiasm for it's own nourishment. In the end, the kids are stressed out, lost, and don't know anything about themselves. How are they supposed to know the real world if they don't know who they are? I know so much about myself, and looking back I can't see how I would ever know these things were I one of those kids who works on homework 24/7. You can be incredibly nearsighted, seeing only those things right in front of you, but you can also be insanely farsighted, seeing only that which lies far off in the distance. All these other kids at my school are worried about college, and here I am worrying about getting over my anxiety, pushing myself out there as a writer, and even finding out what or who I want to be. I end up knowing more about the kids stressed out every moment of every day for colleges and SATs than they do themselves.

I say physics is my main problem, and it is, for the short term. Physics was the last straw that broke my back, whacking a rock already shattered from the stress of the previous school year. However, the effect of physics (i.e., my lack of enthusiasm for anything), is only augmented by the killer amounts of homework the other classes give. Individually, the homework loads make sense, and I understand why the teachers would do that, but put together, such a massive amount of homework only makes sense in an actual college, where one actually can take as many classes a day as they want, not a college-prep school, where one has a very strict requirement of 8 classes total. I'm only one kid, but they judge me as though I'm already sure of myself, as though I already have my life together, as if I have all the time I need to complete the homework. I do, but only at the sacrifice of my personal time, my time to eat, sleep, shower, relax. I need that time, as much as the teachers do. The teachers are expected to teach and give as much homework as they like, but if they actually had to do that homework, along with the homework for all the other classes, with only a certain amount of time to do said homework, I think they'd agree with me.

In my entire life, I've never been stressed out to death by romance or drama or anything like that. Even bullies I've faced, unafraid, with no remorse as I summoned the school counselors to beat them away. It's always been my schoolwork, and it's stressed me out because it consumes me, drawing from my essence of humanity that I'm expected to possess, yet never given time to develop. The teachers say they want us to become human beings, and yet the stress drives us to become zombies. The zombie apocalypse has been strong at LASA, good thing there's a club dedicated to surviving it.

The only thing I disagree with about this pic is that even when they're on their phones, they have emotion, are generally sure of themselves, and care enough about their images to shower and dress well. 

I've done so much learning over the last semester, and yet my grades are terrible. I've learned how to cope with certain types of stress, such as that of my parents' divorce, I've learned how to write and characterize elements in an established storylines (still working on non-established storylines), I've learned how to survive a breakdown brought on by emotional turmoil and desperation. Am I being graded on that? No, even though I'm one of the most rational and philosophical teenagers ever met according to some, I'm not being graded on my ability to find myself.

I ought to be, though, because just by asking myself the questions of who I want to be and who I am and where I want to be, I've already made a decent grade. As for making a perfect 100, however, who ever gets that grade for this subject?