The Honors Life

Honors student. A prestigious title given to students enrolled in “higher level” classes at school.

An honors student is expected to be a “smarter” student. In comparison to average students, honors students are expected to be more organized and have a better school ethic. However, this isn’t all completely true. Honors students are very similar to the average student. Being an honors student, as well as the majority of my friends, my whole high school career, I have a good sense of what an honors student really is. Back in August my teacher asked our AP English class to write an essay about what we think the definition of an honors student is.

And so I wrote a couple paragraphs about how honors student are so great. I wrote about how honors students work harder, are more organized, work better in groups and work at faster paces. I wrote about how honors student have a need to succeed and to increase their knowledge as much as they can. When my teacher asked us to look at this original essay I laughed at my own work. What I wrote was a bunch of lies. Through the school year I realized what it really means to be an honors student and what distinguishes us from “average” students.

Now in my final quarter of my junior year I’ve realized that there is little difference between us honors students and the average students, and that all that I had said about our organization a thirst for knowledge was mostly wrong and proven wrong through my own experiences this year as well as those of my friends. Now, I present you with the true life of an honors student. When someone hears that I, or any other student, am an honors student, they automatically believe that we are some sort of elite student. There is a common belief that we all get straight A’s, that we do all our work, that we love all our classes/school, and that we do everything in an organized manner. This belief is not the truth though.

I haven’t gotten straight A’s all year every year and neither have all my friends. What we have done is maintained our grades throughout the years. We honors students know how difficult it is trying to juggle our friends, family, school, sports, and for some, work around. With average students, one of these activities is cut a bit. The average student may slack a little in school in order to manage everything else.

We honor students try not to cut on anything. Because of this, we become a sort of pack. We help each other however we can. If I don’t understand something, I know that I can count on one of my friends to help me through it or explain the material again. This actually happens frequently with us because of the pace of our classes. Our classes move at a faster pace than average classes, thus sometimes we breeze through material and rely on each other to get through it.

Another common misconception about us is that we are all extremely well organized. People think that we start assignments the day we get them, or that we are over achievers who strive and always want to learn more. Again, this isn’t totally true. To keep it simple, we are all a bunch of procrastinators. We are just advanced procrastinators.

We tend to leave everything for the night before assignments are due. I am an advanced procrastinator. I’m pretty sure that when was originally assigned this paper; I left it till the night before it was due to complete the entire thing. I am frequently being scolded by my parents and some of my friends for leaving things for the last minute. I don’t know about your family, but mine just loves to schedule things or do fun things on Sundays.

I frequently miss out on family movie nights because I am cooped up in my room doing my homework that I didn’t do all weekend, and this doesn’t just go for me. If you ask any other honors student I’m sure they will tell you the same. We are no better organized than the “average” student. We just somehow manage to get our work done in time without sacrificing quality too much. Now others may say that we Love school and our classes.

However, we dislike school just like everyone else. It’s part of being a teen. We don’t like waking up at six in the morning, going to school for another seven hours, and getting home late because of extracurricular activities. We get home late and then we stay up late doing the homework that’s do the next day. Our lives during the school week are like cycles. Because of this we don’t “LOVE” school any more that the average student does.

Of course this isn’t true for everyone. However, I’m sure even you say to yourself sometimes “gosh I’m so tired of school”. Honors students get frustrated and tired of school like everyone else. It’s at about this time of year when a bunch of us begin to enter our summer mode, our mode where we start to procrastinate even more and get lazy. We all wait for the final days of school to approach and summer vacation to be here. All of these assumptions about us are just that, assumptions! We don’t all get straight A’s.

We are not all extremely organized. We do not always get our work done right away, and we don’t all love school. We honors students are just like the average student. The only differences are that we procrastinate more, work more as a team, and we are in honors classes. If an average student began taking honors classes, I can without a doubt tell you that we would “convert” him because I have personally witnessed this with my friend Chandler.

He became more of a procrastinator just like the rest of us, but he was also part of our pack, our team, and succeeded with the rest of us. Chandler is living proof that the difference between the average student and honors student is little and that if you want to obtain this prestigious title you can. You just have move up to the honors classes.