Two weeks before finals week this year I came into a Monday morning class to have one of my students practically glowing. He shared his bubbling discovery with me, along with the other students who were there -- it was his last Monday of classes ever! (the last week of classes started with "spring break" for an Easter Monday holiday). He was a senior and graduating and had a job lined up, and was looking forward to the end of his schooling. Congratulations to him!
I never saw any slacking of his performance in my class, which made me very happy. This was a student who showed up every day, even when there was no assignment due (something that was a problem in this class for the second half of the semester); he was prepared, and appeared interested and involved (which I hope means that he was interested and involved!); he peer read everyone's paper he was assigned, and had all of his intermediate stages turned in on the day they were due. In other words, he was an ideal student, in spite of the temptations of being a senior.
I had a good friend who was a senior when I was a freshman, and about two months from the end of the year, he finally got really snappy -- he had been hard for me to get in touch with for several weeks and I had chided him one too many times for his unavailability. I knew what he was feeling when, three years later, I was a senior, finishing up an honours thesis, and finding it difficult to find time to do the social thing with my friends who were not seniors, and not in my major. Those who were in the major were a bit easier to deal with. Even if they weren't dealing with the thesis at that point, they had things to talk about that seemed relevant and I was okay with hanging out with them for the little hanging out time I had. But one of my good friends was supposed to do something for me as a graduating senior and she didn't get around to it as it didn't seem that important to her and we had a bit of a snap-fest that last week. the next year, she sent me a letter (yes, it was well before email and this was a snail mail message, with a stamp and everything!) saying that she now understood what I was going through and why I had been so stressed as a senior.
That is one kind of the senior experience; the student in my class had another. Both are somewhat academic responses to things. Or at least they are not anti-academic, which at times for me, as a professor, I will take as a victory.
But sometimes students don't have that I-am-still-dedicated-to-completing-these-classes attitude (also known as "I have much better things to do than sitting in this classroom"), and that is something (believe it or not) I quite understand as well. It is, however, something I have difficulty figuring out how to work with. What are my expectations of and for graduating seniors? Should they be any different? At college level I can hide in the "this class has X content and that is what we are covering" and the students are adults and make their own decisions. So if they slip up dramatically at the end, to a certain extent I am not able or do not feel that I should be able to make significant allowances for them (I tend to be a bit cranky about "allowances" anyway, which makes it in some ways easier to give them when a student really deserves one -- someone deploying to Iraq two weeks after the semester is over was one year, another was someone who was fighting cancer and missed a couple of weeks for treatment and only told me late in the semester when she just couldn't get back to the level she had been at earlier. This year, fortunately, there wasn't that dramatic a senior experience!). For me, allowances should be really unforseen things, not "This class was not my top priority so if you give me extra time I can maybe get motivated to do something more interesting to me and you and get myself a better grade" (which, yes, I have had students say to me).
High school senior-itis is even worse to cope with, I would think. I know that teacherken has strategies for dealing with the end of his classes, as the exams come with several days left in the semester, and the motivation and drive of the students is pretty well exhausted by that point. Those who are going to university will already have their acceptances and all they really have to do at that point is finish, and it usually doesn't have to be a spectacular finish, just a finish. How do you keep your students involved in a class, and its content? I don't remember from my high school days, whether there was anything to remember or I have blocked it completely (that was 31 years ago now).
I'd be interested in comments about senior-itis from both students' and teachers' perspectives, both from high school and college. And for the few of you around here who are still in high school, what do you look forward to most about being a senior in high school?