I’m pretty high schools and colleges everywhere are experiencing this around this time of year, but I wanted to talk about it from my perspective as a former special education student.
Senioritis is the “illness” that is befallen upon graduating students as they get closer and closer to the graduation ceremony. Now, people call it an illness because it happens during the final days of a student’s academic career and that their final few classroom assignments are always put at risk of not being completed.
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As a former special education student, I can happily say that I never got senioritis. My objective was for my last few days of high school to be as normal as possible. For a neurodiverse mind, I had enough on my mind when it came to transitioning from one environment to another. However, it’s important to remember that I wasn’t as self-aware at the time about myself, so I didn’t really understand how much of an impact senioritis had on students.
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But as much as senioritis can bring excitement, it can also bring fear to students who are afraid of the unknown.
Let’s be real here, myself included, we always looked at school as a type of daily routine: you get up, you have breakfast, you go to school like you are going to a job, you go home, you have dinner, and you go to bed.
The moment you get that diploma and go into the graduation ceremony preparations, that routine is snatched away from you.
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But there is a way to prepare the student for the onset of senioritis when they have reservations about it. For one thing, it’s important to combat the fears of senioritis at the beginning of the school year such as helping the student create a new routine in their post high school lives. Remember that once we get that diploma and our lives change, so do our routines.
It also helps for the student to get a part-time entry-level job while they are still in school so they can lessen the impact of a sudden transition. Something that I see a lot of (and will discuss in my next blog) is families waiting too long for their neurodiverse and special needs children to get a paid part time job.
Yes, I get the fact that some students need time to learn job and life skills, but a part time job not only serves as a source of income for the graduating student, especially if they are going to college, but also serves as a distraction from the stress that comes with the transition from school to the real world.
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Look for more blogs on the final days of school in the coming days and weeks ahead, because I think this is a topic that a lot of people tend to overlook when graduation nears.
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Catch you all later!!
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