May is the month that turns spring’s promise of renewal into a taunt.
By May, the robotics season has ended, the school play’s set is in a dumpster, and the jazz band’s last note hangs in the air like a bittersweet goodbye. These activities, where we pretended to be more than GPA-optimizing machines, dissolve, leaving behind the faint ache of what we might’ve created if not for the AP Physics 1 final.
Summer looms, but there’s no time to linger on goodbyes: only frantic trading of notes and whispered pleas for “any tips on DBQs.” The last days of high school, mythologized as golden and nostalgic, are instead a blur of highlighters and exhaustion. We’re told to savor these moments, but how do you savor a sinking ship?
And when it’s over? There’s no catharsis, just a numb shuffling toward the next year. The scores will come in August and the cycle will reset. Another crop of students will sit where we sat.
We are not the first to limp through these weeks, and we won’t be the last. The College Board’s machinery is too well-oiled, the myth of meritocracy too entrenched. Schools will keep trading theater programs for exam prep seminars and art studios for rows of desks facing AP review videos. They’ll call it “rigor,” but rigor mortis is closer to the truth.
Schools preach “holistic education,” then amputate every creative limb to make room for exam prep. We are taught to conflate rigor with worth, as if suffering is a prerequisite for success. We’ve learned to equate burnout with virtue, to wear our under-eye circles as badges of honor.
Friendships? Creativity? Those are luxuries for people who aren’t drowning in practice FRQs.
So here’s to May: the month that takes everything and gives nothing back.