Senior projects have been questioned for years. While a select few have taken advantage of the opportunity and done something worthwhile, many seniors use the two-to-three free weeks after AP exams wasting time on uninspired projects.
That is why this year the high-school faculty has replaced the projects with “senior seminars.”
For the two weeks after AP exams, the seniors will come to school and hear talks on various topics, all to prepare us for what we will need to know in college and beyond.
While some seniors groan at the idea of coming to school for four hours a day or complain that the talks will be boring, I’m relieved.
I had been dreading the senior projects. Without anything close to an idea, I knew that I would end up as one of those students who wasted their time.
I was also happy because, let’s face it, with graduation so tantalizingly close at that point, who is going to want to do 40 hours of work on a project then put together a presentation?
Now all we have to do is show up.
Some may argue that with this requirement many people are not going to pay attention or get anything out of the seminars.
Aren’t these the same people who would be wasting their time on pointless projects?
What students get out of either the senior projects or the new senior seminars is ultimately up to them, and no additional requirements will change that.
This is why I applaud the teachers for this new idea. It will give us seniors access to useful information that we would not learn in a high-school or college class, and still allow us plenty of time to relax after the stress of APs.
The first suggestion is some sort of financial-planning seminar to prepare us for being more financially independent in college.
While this may not sound entirely appealing, I think many seniors could benefit from it.
According to Sue Nellis, head of the high school, seminars such as this would be accompanied by other more interesting classes that the seniors would help to pick. This creates a nice balance between fun, interesting classes and useful, practical ones.
And as an added bonus, this arrangement gets parents, teachers and students out of having to listen to mandatory presentations on meaningless topics.
This is our chance to learn all the things that will be expected of us as adults but that no one ever has time to teach us, such as the difference between an American Express card and a Visa card.
Some argue that this information is obvious or self-explanatory, but that is exactly the kind of attitude that leads people to go years without learning it.
