It’s time for ‘Festivus’ and those mid-year finals

For a lot of high school kids this can be a very hard time of the year. Sure, winter break is rolling around, and the semester is almost over. But for most schools, next week is finals week.

Finals will  put kids under the stress of studying and reviewing everything they have learned over the semester.

Ever since Thanksgiving break, the workload has gotten heavier, and more time needs to be spent studying. Most teachers put in the final as a big part of the semester grad, and I think even people who slack during the semester realize that these tests need to be taken seriously.

Since this is my first year in high school, I have never experienced the finals prep and, at first, it was pretty overwhelming. My binder and backpack are a mess of notes and review papers that have been seemingly thrown at us.

A good way to make sure you get everything done in a reasonable amount of time is to make a daily schedule planner. Make a list and write down what you are going to be doing at every minute of the day and it will really help with the workload, stress and time management.

Say you scheduled biology review for 5 to 6 p.m., or however long you felt you needed, and then English from 6:30 to 7:30, you are getting everything done that needs to be done while it may not seem to be as much work.

It may seem a little hard, but I have begun to spend every day and every free minute of time I have to study and prepare for the final exams next week. Also around this time of the school year, all of the students begin to see the light at the end of the long, long tunnel. Most kids are already making plans for what they want to do over the three-and-a-half-week break.

Over this winter break I will be starting track practice. I am running the one-mile, two-mile, and the 800-meter dash. I plan to practice as hard as I can so I can do really well when the season starts.

At the end of last year I applied for ASB at Elsinore High School. I was one of the six freshman who were accepted. ASB stands for Associated Student Body. It’s a great program/club for kids in high school, and it is also good for kids in middle school who want to get a head start. ASB really helps kids get involved and unite with other students with the same goals for the school as them.

ASB helps kids to become leaders. I think being in the environment that is the crazy ASB class at Elsinore helps kids who may be shy or not feel like they are a part of the school get out of their shells and do activities, and participate in things that they usually wouldn’t participate in. The goal in ASB is to make the kids at school feel like they are welcome and to make everyone’s high school experience better.

At Christmas time in ASB there are many traditions. One is that, every yea,r on the last week of school, we have a party called “Festivus.” Festivus is from the TV show Seinfeld. It is basically the Christmas party, except a lot more fun. At Festivus we will skip the airing of grievances and the wrestling, but we will have the horrible gift exchange and the Festivus pole.

For the gift exchange, you go to the dollar store and buy five gifts. You buy three horrible presents that no one would ever want to get, and then you buy two good gifts to make up for it.

Another tradition is a thing called Operation Santa Claus. This is a toy drive for orphans and kids who won’t be getting presents this Christmas. The freshman are put in charge of it.

We put a Christmas tree in the office and decorate it with paper ornaments. Each ornament has a kid’s name and age on it. People come into the office and grab an ornament. They then go buy a present for a boy or girl with that age and put it under the tree. Then the presents are distributed. But before all of this can happen, the freshman need to find the tree.

Every year, after the toy drive is over, the freshman of that year hide the tree somewhere on the campus. Then the next year, when the new freshman have to decorate the tree, they use the now sophomores’ hints to find it.

This year we were looking for two days during lunch and during ASB. We finally found out that after the flood the previous year, the tree had been thrown away.

ASB is a great program and everyone should apply next year.




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