How do I get back into the swing of school after having such a long break?

-Winter Break Frowny Face

Argyle: The best way to get back into the routine of the school day is to keep your sleep schedule as messed up as possible. If you’re lying in bed at night and the clock says any time before four in the morning get up and start playing with that weird puppet your aunt got you for Hanukkah. If you start going to bed early again too soon, you won’t get restful sleep. The best way to adjust this back to normal is to just pull an all-nighter the night before and have one absolutely terrible day of school the following morning. This day is inevitable anyway so you might as well get it out of the way on your first day back to avoid having to face your problems in the long run.

Archer: Well one thing you need to make sure you didn’t do is any of your homework. Why do your homework when they have given you three extra days off from doing it? I mean, who actually did their homework the day it was assigned? Just about no one. Why do it that night if you can just wait until the next morning to write some stuff down and get credit for completion? It’s a win win situation for you, I say you do it.

Argyle: It’s not like break is that fun anyway. The holidays and New Years are nothing compared to the three months of blistering cold major holiday-less winter that follows in January, February, and March. Who needs a break when you can wake up at six in the morning and walk across a huge construction site to take a keyboarding class that only comes in handy when you’re trolling scrubs in League of Legends? If we lived in Russia, it would be January all year long, so at least we’re not them, right? St. Patrick’s Day is way better than Christmas.

Archer: It’s not like anyone actually wants to come back to school after break, right? So why should we? One way to get back in that ‘back to school swing’ is simply by just not going. We literally have one truancy officer. If enough of us didn’t go to school, what are they going to do? Send Mr. Hartenstein to every one of our houses in the middle of the coldest months of the year? I think not. This is another situation where its a win win for you. You don’t have to go to school nor are you going to get in any kind of trouble for not going.

Having those snow days last week was great, but why did we have school on Friday?

-Confused High School Student

Argyle: This is a great question. We have come to the conclusion that it was purely a stunt to open a window of opportunity for a 72 hour all teacher exam preparation party. Teachers procrastinate just as much as us students, and because of this a lot of them didn’t have their exams or exam reviews ready to go, so to fix this they had the superintendent call off school for three days so they could all get back on track. However, this didn’t work at all because again, a lot of teachers procrastinated and still didn’t have all of their stuff done. In conclusion, we are all screwed because we lost a ton of potential review days.

Archer: My personal opinion is that they wanted to wait for the coldest day of the week to give us school. We got to stay home from and stay protected from those wimpy -11 degree wind chills so that the school could see us suffer even more in the -20 degree wind chills. The several hours of homework per night, the brutal tests every week, and, or course, the traditionally vicious midterm exams weren’t enough to satisfy them so they had to add in a few cases of frostbite to the juniors and elementary school kids to really make our suffering worth their while.

Argyle: Another reason we had school Friday was so we could mess our sleep schedules up even more. Seriously, who had a normal sleep schedule this week after two weeks of break, one day back to school, then three calamity days in a row, then back to school on Friday? I’m sure I can answer that: No one. That includes the teachers as well. How many teachers actually gave students any kind of work on Friday? Most teachers just assigned exam reviews or busy work, nothing that I needed to waste eight hours of my life about. Thanks for trying, but I would have rather stayed up until four in the morning playing video games then waking up in the afternoon and eating pancakes for lunch. Surely just about any student agree with me on that, right?

Archer: Honestly, the reason we had school on Friday was solely for the purpose of teachers being able to give us our exam reviews. No matter how we look at it, we can’t really push exams back at all, the calendar doesn’t allow for it. As unfortunate as that is, it’s the truth. The part that makes it worse is that we had three days off to forget everything that we were going to eventually cram for. No matter how we look at it, exams are this week. We could have had Friday off and exams still would have been this week. If it were up to me though, I would have cancelled school on Friday. No one learned anything and no teachers assigned anything. Friday just seemed like a pointless day of school for just about everyone.

I forgot to study for my exams this week and I have to pass them so I can pass my class. What should I do?

-Forgot to Give a Name

Argyle: First of all no you didn’t no one really forgets to study for exams they just plain don’t do it, and I’m not judging I’m just being real with you here. The first step in this process is excepting the fact you didn’t study, not that you forgot to because lets face it we all knew exams were coming. The only real option here is to bank on the exams being extremely easy, and the majority of them are. Yeah, there are some exceptions like AP Physics and Calculus, but if your biggest concern is your Arts and Crafts exam then stop worrying. If you’re dealing with a bigger class that will for sure have a hard exam your best bet is to flee to California and become one of those homeless run aways that Miley Cyrus is always talking about.

Archer: Cram. Your last hope is to cram. You’ve officially reached panic mode and your last hope is just to cram for your exams. Whether it’s those five minutes before an exam a teacher gives you or it’s the morning before, you have to cram. You won’t get all of the information that you need to know for your exam, but at least you will get some of it and you could potentially increase your chances of not failing the exam. Be warned though, cramming shouldn’t be used as an alternative to actually studying for exams and tests. Cramming should only be used in extreme cases, such as forgetting to study for your exam.

Argyle: How often do we know all of the material that will be on an exam? Never. How can teachers expect us to answer questions about stuff that we’ve never learned about in their class, right? This year, instead of getting stressed out about the questions you have no clue about, just answer the questions you know and blow the rest of them off. After all, if you answer enough of the questions you know correctly, you’re bound to get at least a ‘D’ on your exams. As the saying goes, “Cs and Ds get degrees.” Why stress about stuff you don’t know and risk failing when you can answer questions you do know and still get a passing grade? After all, if you stress about what you don’t know, you run the risk of forgetting what you do know. Just sit back, relax, and only answer what you feel like answering.

Archer: You could just not take your exam and then avoid the problem all together. If you’re lucky, your teacher will just exempt your exam grade and then your grade won’t change at all. Sure your grade won’t rise at all, but it also won’t drop at all. Maybe you’ll get even luckier and your teacher will round your grade up. After all, exams are only roughly 5% of your final grade, your grade can’t be that low if you need the exam to pass. I say you take the easiest of these solutions and just skip all of your exams.

COMMENT ANY QUESTIONS YOU HAVE. WE WILL ANSWER THEM FOR YOU.