Most mornings my sister, senior Ellie Mollica, drives the both of us to school and around this time, we often voice how neither of us has motivation at the end of the school year. For seniors, this is called senioritis. It happens when seniors have been accepted to college, know where they are attending, and then experience a lack of motivation to get schoolwork done and study for tests. However, an issue that has been overshadowed when talking about the end of the year is a lack of motivation within the other grades.
It’s obvious throughout the school: motivation throughout the year lowers as the year goes on. But why motivation goes down is the real question. As the year progresses, students’ school work gets more challenging, especially in the third quarter, which leaves students feeling burnt out and tired going into the fourth quarter. “After the huge workload in the third quarter, my body feels so burnt out and I feel as if I have almost no energy for the fourth quarter. I still try my best to power through though even if I want to nap every class,” sophomore James Colvin said.
Another contributing factor to low motivation is the decrease in workload as teachers might give less work in the fourth quarter. This could be because a lot of the work is projects that are assigned over long periods of time. “Across all my classes I have four projects,” junior Kai O’Brien said.
As the number of assignments goes down, students’ motivation follows suit. As I sit in class when new assignments are being handed out, I see my classmates sleeping, scrolling on their phones, or drawing on the back of the handed-out assignments. “My motivation along with my energy goes down as I get further on in the year and closer to summer. It’s not that the assignments aren’t interesting, I just find it hard to push myself to do the assignments even when they’re right in front of me,” junior Anthony Derba said.
In my personal experience class, I find it harder to do projects or assignments that have a prolonged due date. If an assignment is due a week from when it was assigned, I might feel like I have so much time to do it that I will push it off until I have minimal time to complete it. This can lead to a loss of points, whether that’s because the assignment was late or because the quality of the assignment was not sufficient.
While procrastination is not exclusive to just the end of the year, it is certainly amplified. Along with students being tired and not having enough motivation to complete assignments, students who have past instances of procrastination are more affected. “Throughout my years of teaching, it has become more and more apparent that students find it harder to complete assignments in the fourth quarter, this is why I’ve implemented the fact that everything needs to be done by June 7,” history teacher Keith Yannity said.
