Teen Voices provides first-person insight into the thoughts and lives of local teenagers.

Oh, dear, here we are again. It’s that horrific time in between spring break and summer break, when the teachers cram 30,000 tests, major projects and lectures into the school day. About half of them start marching double time to make up for missed classes and unforeseen tangents.

According to Murphy’s Law, this would naturally be the point of the year when we students hit our lowest energy levels. It’s not necessarily the bright spring breeze and the warm smells of impending summer. Here in Bend, spring is more like rain, sleet and hail.

No, the problem is simply that all the students have been in school now for about seven months. Frankly, none of us want to be here anymore. We’ve sunk into a routine, we no longer put any passion or energy into the schoolwork, and we couldn’t care less about chromosomes and cosines and diagramming sentences.

The reasoning goes something like this; “Who diagrams sentences in the real world?”

As a great many of my friends enjoy pointing out, it’s not as if you’re going to sit down at your first job interview, and the first thing your potential employer does is lean across the table, look you in the eye with an intense glare and bark out, “How do you diagram the sentence, ‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe?’”

Who cares how you figure out aggregate demand? Does it matter if I can find the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle with a base of four inches? Why do I have to learn about the way chromosomes twist into chromatin? Or was that chromatid? And what’s the difference?

Every little thing this time of year seems like a useless piece of trivia. Nobody knows and nobody cares, except our incredibly annoying, dense and pointless teachers. Are we ever really going to use this?

Naturally, the correct answer is yes, you are going to use it, whether you like it or not. And for the most part, we know that. So we don’t completely ignore our teachers and our schoolwork. We haul ourselves up through the tidal wave of apathy and climb step by step up the mountain of carelessness until we reach the top and can slide down into summer break.

So how do we force ourselves to become interested in school again? It’s different for everybody. Usually I try to find something that really interests me. For example, in science we just talked about eugenics, which is one of the most disgusting and curiously fascinating topics I have ever heard of. Last year I found myself fascinated by the tension in the Cold War.

Other people remind themselves of their parents’ reactions if they come home with a report card with bad grades. So they think of the fear of punishment to motivate themselves. Usually fear isn’t the greatest motivator, but it certainly works for some people.

Another friend of mine thinks about the college she wants to get into. If her GPA doesn’t come up to their usual standard, she will have a much harder time getting into the college. So she thinks about her college and her degree, and she works now to protect her future.

There are all kinds of ways to get back into school again during this nutty spring-fever season of wishing we didn’t have to do it anymore. Eventually, we’ll make it over this strange hurdle, and then we’ll have an easy time tripping and falling our way down into summer break.

Then we’ll be free for a few short weeks until we’re back in school again with fresh minds and fresh perspectives.