Second advisory: The snow falls and so do your grades!

Graphic by Aiden Holmes

Graphic by Aiden Holmes

Anya Herzberg and Nava Roskes

Three-day weekends, Thanksgiving break, and few Monday bells: November sounds

great! But piles of tests and work combined with limited time to fix grades turns our shortest advisory into a nightmare. 

Compared to the other advisories, second advisory seems to be the easiest. First advisory is just weeks of getting used to teachers, and adapting to the crowded hallways. Third advisory has the most work, and on top of that, it is the coldest time of the year. Don’t even get us started on fourth advisory. Beautiful, warm weather and where are we? Trapped inside Wilson for seven hours a day. 

Compared to these dreadful-sounding times, the second advisory is looking pretty good. And it is! Except for the fact that everything is going a million miles per hour. It feels like the last lap of Mario Kart where the music gets fast and everyone’s just doing what they can to stay on track. You get a bunch of homework, then bam: an exam. You take the exam and what do you get? A 68 percent. But it’s okay because you can make it up, right? Actually, you can’t, because it’s already the third advisory. 

And how could we forget about midterms? Coming back to school after winter break, everything should feel fresh. New year new you, right? Apparently not. Same units, same schedule, same workload. A break is a time to let go of the stress of school, and return feeling ready to turn over a new leaf with that teacher who hates you. But thanks to midterms right around the corner, it’s impossible to simply move on. Second advisory may seem like the perfect combination of school and relaxation, but if you think about it, the amount of work doesn’t go down, just the amount of time in school to do it. It’s stressful. It sucks. •