Journal Entry #7

How is school going so far?

      I’ve only spent 11 days at Fenn this year, and things are going quite a lot better than how I first thought. As opposed to last year, I fortunately ended up being proven wrong. Math, instead of the stressful, consuming slog of past years, has ended up being easier than English (no offense) and Windsor Mountain was a critical learning moment instead of a boring chore. 

     The goals I laid out at the start of the year are all well on their way to completion. A group visit to Lincoln-Sudbury is planned for boys interested in going, I’m loving Mr. Romero’s Spanish class and learning more than ever, and I have much less stress in my life than I did last year.

     It’s hard to underestimate the peace, the joy, the sense of freedom, that comes with a lack of stress I haven’t had at school since 5th grade. I go to school in the mornings and can fail at learning banjo while Panha draws instead of frantically completing science homework. When I get home, I can make a cup of tea and leisurely read a book before starting my homework, safe in the knowledge I have the time to do so. My work might be hard or boring, take an hour or five minutes, but I fundamentally understand it. Contrary to what I think many of my classmates believe, good grades haven’t come naturally to me at Fenn. The jury is still out on whether or not that’s due to my own incompetence instead of the actual schoolwork, but whatever the cause, I have better grades in almost all my classes than I did at this point last year, and with less effort. Less stress means less procrastination and more productivity, creating a self-repeating and beneficial cycle.

     My worries about math and my advisory, while founded, have been significantly dispelled; Mr. Barker is much less demanding or exacting than Ms. Youk See or Mr. Sanborn, and I have barely any classes with my fellow Cribb advisory members. Even problems I didn’t foresee at the start of the year, like my pneumonia-cold “one-two punch” preventing me from participating in sports at all until last week and fully until mid-October, have been surprisingly easily solved. But, as Fitz has paraphrased from FDR many times, “a calm sea never a captain makes”. These eleven days, sickness nonwithstanding, have been my calm sea. I may be a sailor, but the real test - the important test - lies in the mist of the future.