We wake up, go through days we weren’t exactly looking forward to, repeat, and so on. But now it seems this isn’t just any other year. This is the year. The year so significant that my future college, career and heck, even my future family life depends on it. I’m in that phase of life that is well-talked about. Once you’re a ninth grader, teachers and parents say, ‘Wait until you’re doing the Personal Project” or “You won’t need this now, I’m just letting you know it will be extremely serious once you’re older.” The question really is, “Am I at the point where I have all the tools and values and rules that have been taught to me but I was never fully expected to call upon as a ninth and tenth grader? Should ‘maturity’ just pop out of me like a bunny from a magician’s hat?

I wonder if there is a section in students’ brains where they are able to retrieve various forms of information from the past and go, “Yep, that’s the one I need for this.” In eleventh grade, you should be able to do all the required information set up by some adults who probably didn’t take this curriculum but have formulated it in a way that is ‘better.’ I feel like there are more policies and ‘supposed-to-dos’ than the actual information gathering I need that is applicable to real life situations. Not that memorising important formulas or knowing all the functions of the body aren’t important but will my memorization skills of masses of information really help me if I am doing a business interview, a presentation to possible clients or learning how to make challenging decisions? There is nothing wrong with all of this but the focus is so easily shifted when you are swarmed in it.

From what I’ve heard from all the people who lived longer than me, this is supposed to be an easier, simpler phase of life where you worry about things you won’t remember a decade from now. If things get harder, why not prepare us for what is going to come or how to handle things that will be thrown at us? This is a very big and general question, I am aware of that. But as a thought-provoking, mind-rambling article, think about it. We are always thinking of the next homework, next assignment, and next deadline. Always working for things that aren’t in the present day we live in, and we are never really satisfied with much in life. Either we want more or we get bored with the routine of things. But to learn how the system works and get used to that, then to suddenly have that broken and then thrown into a bigger sea of varying routines and systems, makes you think how we even know what we are doing. How do we know what the system we are following and satisfying is what we are even supposed to follow?

To narrow down the picture, the more ways I create more questions and more scenarios, the more I realise that you are just going round in circles about what this year is: just a bending road where you can never see clearly.