The Year Ahead

What could go wrong?

     My 8th grade year isn’t looking as bad as it did at first glance. However, I’m not exactly what one could call optimistic about it. That might just be my anxiety, though - in 7th grade I had similar feelings and ended up having a great year.

    I’m hoping that many of my long-term goals will be achieved. I’ve always wanted to truly master Spanish, and feel that this year is a very good opportunity to work towards being so. Mr. Romero seems like a really good fit, and frankly, anything would be better than Mrs. Gupta was last year. It was a little bit of a letdown to have her as my teacher - I was primed to learn a lot at the start of last year and wasn’t able to - but at least now I’m well on my way.

     Another goal of mine is connecting with the boys I’ll be going to Lincoln-Sudbury with. I’m friends with some of them, but for the most part I don’t even know who’s going where at the end of this year. I expect that will come in time as eighth grade progresses, though. I’ll just have to wait and see.

     Specifying less concrete goals has always been hard for me. I suppose that I want to be less stressed about school work than I was last year. I really don’t know what being relaxed and happy at school even is, much less how to get there. Apart from the relatively easy to achieve goals that I talked about in the last paragraph, I feel more or less lost. Uncertainty about the future has always been on my mind.

     More so than not, that uncertainty tends to send me into a spiral of self-doubt and anxiety about the future. Starting this year has left me feeling the same. When I learned who my fellow advisees were, I honestly felt shocked and blindsided by the choice. As far as I could tell, they were all friendly while none of them were friendly with me. I had seen most of them in class together, and the only one who I’ve had meaningful contact with was the only person in my advisory last year I didn’t get along with. They’re athletic and have been here since fourth grade; I’m neither.

      Another flashpoint of stress is math. I tend to be at the lower end of the accelerated math spectrum at Fenn, meaning I struggle behind some of my more gifted classmates. I’ve ended up just scraping by with a B minus or C plus, and have been kept going by the inspirational encouragement of my last two advisors and math teachers, Mr. Sanborn and Ms. Youk See. They’ve made a huge difference for me, and the expected lack of support from this year’s teacher, Mr. Barker, worries me.

     In conclusion, I’m not sure how to feel about eighth grade. There are things to be worried about, and things to be excited about. As with everything else in life, I’ll figure it out soon enough.