WOODBURY – As the end of the year begins to creep up on us, students slowly begin to lose motivation towards schoolwork, getting to school on time, and participating in class.
“We know that summer is right around the corner,” says Connor Segers, junior at Nonnewaug, “and you’ve been working hard for months on end, so it gets to the point where you’re close to being done where you don’t get as much effort.”
Marisa Christoff, social studies department chair, says the distraction of summer fun tends to draw students attention more than schoolwork.
“I don’t think motivation and effort necessarily decline,” Christoff says. “However, I do think it might be harder to focus with the anticipation of all of the fun end-of-the-year events and celebrations approaching such as prom, graduation, and summer break.”
However, some students say that as the year progresses, motivation to do certain tasks does go down.
“I would say I still feel motivated for tests,” says junior Brayden Whipple. “If you have a lower grade, it can really bring it up. But with classwork, it is just kind of more fooling around because we aren’t as focused as we were at the beginning of the year.”
Towards the end of the year, students tend to be burnt out and prioritize exams over classwork.
“With rolling grades, if you stack up enough quality grades, it gets very tough to move,” says Segers. “As long as you do the work, you don’t have to give as much effort to continue to maintain high grades.”
Rolling grades tend to allow students to slack off when it comes to completing work on time and well.
“I always try to do my best but classwork-wise, [but] at the end of the year I just kind of slack off because of rolling grades,” says Whipple.
Though students may want to give up on putting effort into their school work, the end of the year is a time where students do have to put effort into studying to do well for their finals and AP exams.
“I feel like I don’t give as much effort until we get to a couple weeks up to the finals when I start to really study for them,” says Segers.
Christoff says that there’s psychology behind what happens to students at the end of the year. It’s called General Adaptation Syndrome: After going through a stressful time period, you enter an exhaustion phase where you feel mentally and physically drained.
That describes many students in mid-to-late spring.
“The end of April and early May is actually crunch time for AP students,” says Christoff. “AP students are studying more this time of the year and are more stressed as they prepare for their exam which takes place in the first two weeks of May. I do think after the exam there is an exhaustion phase that kicks in. It’s important that students are aware of this and take care of themselves by eating well, sleeping the right amount of hours, and partaking in self care.”
Students and teachers are both counting down until June 13.
“Everyone is just looking forward to summer coming up,” Whipple says, “and with only a month left of school, everybody is more focused on that than doing work.”
