Trying new things can change school experience

BY Spencer Massicot

Although it may not seem like too big of a deal, the continuous dread of the upcoming school year is enough to rattle a student’s mind. After summer vacation, students need to prepare for the commitments, work, focus and stress that the new school year will bring. As teenagers, we are lucky that we get such a long break for summer as well as days off throughout the year, but the end of vacation is never an easy thing to cope with. Back to school shopping commercials sure do not help.

Since school is such a big part of our lives, and we are constantly reminded of it when the year is in session, making it interesting is imperative in keeping our daily lives from becoming monotonous. The best way to prevent complete boredom is to change things up in your routine every now and then. Repeating the same activities and experiences year after year is not the way that we should be going through school. Since we are in our youth, trying as many new things as possible to spice up our lives is very important.

There are many ways to change up your experience; some can be very minor while others can be major commitments that may take some adjusting to. Small things like changing where your group sits at lunch, talking to one new person, or even just the route you take to get to your next class have the opportunity to change your overall high school experience in a major way. Big things like joining a new club or sport, taking a new class, or making a whole new group of friends will no doubt change the way you go through your day to day high school life.

Making new friends can sometimes feel like a daunting task, but I feel that bonds with people formed naturally will remain stronger than those bonds with people who you may just want to become friends with. With that, I think that we owe a lot to our teachers’ arranged seating charts. That new chart you do not want to have anything to do with may seat you next to a classmate who you have never once talked to or planned to talk to. At first this new situation can be kind of awkward, but after some time you can form a natural bond with this person and that connection can end up lasting even after the next seating chart comes out.

Another easy way to grow closer to people is by joining some sort of extracurricular activity. When you are spending a lot of your free time around a new group of people, friendships will begin to form automatically. Just by being in the same program you have something in common, and more things can build off of that commonality. The group of people in your extracurricular, whether it be a sport, club, or another program, can all relate to one another and from there instinctive relationships will be created. I know that this to be true from personal experience.

When I joined the cross country team the summer before my freshman year, I only knew about five people on the entire team and I was awkward and shy around the rest of the people. Since then, I have made close bonds with people on the whole team. Some my teammates are now my best friends who I do so many enjoyable things with.

Another great way to change up your ordinary routine is to take a new class that you might be interested in. For example, this coming school year I am going to be taking AP Psychology. I was looking for a class to fill an empty space I had in my schedule and when I looked into this class I found that I might really take an interest in it. Classes and electives involving the fine arts, language and even core subjects can spark a new interest in you that you may want to pursue in the future and can make you actually look forward to your next class for a change.

In our minds, a lot of the time in school is just a place to learn things that may seem pointless at that time or a place where we go to prepare ourselves for a career, but I believe that it is much more than that. School gives us the opportunity to create experiences for ourselves and interact with other people our age while we are still in our adolescence. Learning new things at a young age will shape our minds for the rest of our lives. The bonds we make can also stay with us for the rest of our lives. It is all up to us to prevent our school lives from slipping into a repetitious cycle and trying anything you can will help with that.