... who dreads November

I'm procrastinating.

It might seem silly, but there's a very good reason why I am. There's a pile, a huge mountain of homework stacked up on my desk, in my bag and on my USB keys and emails. I don't want to do it.

There are also little red notes, written into my school diary, proclaiming days and nights of nervousness. SAC days. Days of doing SACs. And I don't want to do them either.

So really, I should be doing my homework as practice for my upcoming, inevitable SACs. It makes sense to practice writing essays, and complete comprehension questions, applying my understanding to every little detail in the course outline so that when that SAC day comes, I know my stuff. It would be a breeze, right? Just go in, knowing my stuff, and complete everything in a 75 minute period. Done.

And because my head knows that, I'll stop procrastinating, and do my homework. I'll do all of it, or as much as I can, because I know how important my grades are and I really do care about doing well.

But just hearing teachers say that awful E-word just makes me dread November. "You have to know this for the exam", they say, or "this will probably be on the exam" or even, "this is how they separate the good kids from the great kids in the exams". Everything comes down to what you know on that day, with those white pages staring you in the face, and only you can decide how much you can pull yourself together, and just write the answers.

So I dread November. Not really because I feel like I won't know enough about my studies to do well on the exams, but rather because I'm wondering: what will I know afterwards? When I have to  go out into the world as an adult, will I be prepared? I always thought that highschool would prepare you for that, but now it seems we're being prepared for November, and that's all.

So what about December? And the next year after that? After I've relinquished the memorized theories, dates, names and terminology, what will I know that can help me in the real world? I really do wonder.

This is Shi, procrastinating just a little more.