How I fell off during HS

Being a (supposedly) very well respected student in the cohort, you would have expected me to spend more time with my own year level. Except there were some inaccuracies to that statement. Just because I won a formal award didn't actually mean I felt respected, because who's to say the nominations were done out of pity?

They say high school can be one of the best phases of your life, but not when you have one-sided friendships or lack a sense of morale in your cohort. If asking one of your peers for feedback in English feels like asking them to drink poison then I don't think that sounds like a united or connected cohort does it? You could say people are busy, but this is a subject that is pinned to your Top 4, so why lowball it? We may all have different priorities in Year 12, but I think leaving with no regrets should be one of the higher ones, and underperforming academically means you will probably have a regret. Perhaps my cohort was oblivious to moderation and didn't realise how badly lazier students could drag the cohorts SACs down, I feel sorry for the students that accelerated subjects that year, especially if they had to do an extra subject cos their SACs were underwhelming.

There came a point where I just stopped tolerated other people's bullshit, their normalisation of other people's toxic traits, or blatant ignorance to other people's trash talk were red flags that they were probably shitty people. Fifteen months on and no way am I organisation a reunion for my cohort, especially with LinkedIn and Instagram. There came a point where I felt I had no incentive to be a good student, being stuck with collective punishments and earloads in assembly on what seemed like common sense if you had a brain cell. Sure lunchtime help clubs existed but most of the time it was just students nagging teachers for feedback, not much across peers, probably because its stupidly difficult to understand the marking of holistically marked subjects. People like dodging so much I'm very surprised there was no house battleball competition in Year 12.

I didn't go to swimming, I didn't go to athletics not even movie night. Ok I was a bit lazy, I couldn't be fucked I can't teleport OK. There is a saying that a village is only as good as its people, and this village wasn't very pleasant. Pretending to be OK when really I was just hiding the pain, wishing someone could help me out, be it academically or to hold me accountable but everyone else was too cool or some shit. Morale and time until graduation were low, stress levels were high but no one wanted to address the elephant in the room: our time management. What was the point in telling us why we shouldn't study for other subjects in class if we were told how to avoid that in the first place, especially with these stupidly underwhelming wellbeing incursions. I think the last straw was when I got reported to wellbeing for trying to dip out of mock exams, seemed the senior school team really just wanted to dodge the issue with that one. Imagine if that controversy escalated to the news, no not again.

You would think if the semesters sucked so much, the holidays would be nice right? Not really, well it could've been worse but thankfully I was comfortable going out alone over the years. No, the issue isn't holiday homework either, that's a given. The issue were those aforementioned one-sided friendships, felt like I would dealing with NPCs who only knew how to say "uhhhhhhhhh idk" or "no", no alternative, no solution, no counter-offer just red flags that they weren't worth my time. Now I think about I think for English people chose a different text so they could dodge feedback requests from me, wouldn't that be so coincidental. Even after exams, seemed people would just let any and every hurdle in the way impede our ability to catchup, not bothered to work around them. I'm not crazy I know some can't be worked around, but if your time management skills or sleep schedule is shit and you don't fix it, that's your fault. Seems no one wants to put themselves out there, but more onto that in another blog post. Outgrowing bowling didn't do me any favours, especially since no one wanted to try anything new so I couldn't quite find a new hobby at that time. Imagine how fun going karaoke or playing maimai would've been then.

Well it seems dodging requests fucked our cohort up a lot, worst cohort performance in a decade and no its not because of COVID or exam leaks cos the rest of the cohort statewide dealt with that. Last days here were exams, it felt too depressing idk how people find it motivating. Ultimately glad I gave up serving a bunch of bozos that declared me 'too dumb' the moment they declined me from early entry, one could say I was too insecure of my academics and that I won't deny.