By Nate Loibl
Final exams are always a tough part of the school year. Where a student has to reach back into the depths of his or her memory bank and pull out all of the content that they learned in that semester. To top it off, the student has to do that for up to seven classes.
In all honesty, this is the part of the year everyone look at their grades and their heart starts pounding due to the fact that they realized that they didn’t try as hard as they should’ve. That their grades don’t reflect their true “intelligence” and that their grandparents wont be happy when they ask if they got all A’s this semester.
Most of the time, teachers at this point of the year don’t care about the grades of students and want to just get into the summer when they don’t have to worry about grading tests, dealing with trouble-making teens who are trying to take a stand and cheat the system, or the 4-C’s that make their students “ready for the outside world.”
Some look at finals as a pointless week where they get a half day off from school to go and do “hoodrat” things with their friends, either because they have great grades that won’t drop if they bomb the test, or they don’t care if they get a good grade or not.
But most students look at finals week as a death week where they study nonstop hoping to save their grade and get into the college that they really want to, even though, chances are they don’t even know what they want to major in.
Occasionally you get a teacher that sees eye-to-eye with you and makes the final very easy, taking a little load off the shoulders of a stressed out teen. A stress out teen who goes home to a fridge full of food, a nice bed to cry in after the physics final, and ibuprofen to take to relieve the headache from all of the strenuous studying.
Or you take AP Lang, and you have been done with the final and the AP exam for three weeks, yet you still have a 150-point project on Othello, where you have to translate the god-awful Shakespearian English to modern dialect, act it out, and then take a quiz over the whole thing.
Finals are always a stressful time of the year. And can make or break a student’s grade. You see the occasional tear, mental breakdown, and exhausted student who is trying to keep that A or trying to finish the class with a B. You can smooth-talk your teacher to try to get that grade rounded: bring them Starbucks, give them a gift card to Panera (the mecca of stay-at-home moms, retired book club ladies, and teachers), or reminisce on the fun times you two shared that semester.
Finals. What’s not to love?