How can you not love SparkNotes?

Pre-College Topics High School Life
1

<p>Stay Home from School to Save Your Sanity<br>
Mar 10, 2009 </p>

<p>Going to high school day after day can be an unrelenting proposition, especially if you’re actually trying to pass. With the periodic table to memorize, the Spanish-American War to pretend to understand, and Moby-Dick to skim for phallic symbols, it’s easy to fall behind, especially if you also want a social life.</p>

<p>One of the most popular techniques for managing the pressure of the high school grind is to internalize the stress until you break down both emotionally and physically. We at SparkNotes feel this coping method is, in the parlance of the day, totally freaking wack. Here’s our alternative: When everything simply becomes too much, stay home from school.</p>

<p>Now before you run and tell your parents that some web site excused you from learning for, like, ever, please hear us out. Like in Swift’s A Modest Proposal, you need to read our scheme carefully to understand the nuances. After all, this isn’t an easy trick to pull off. But if you’re game, here are some tips for selling the idea to your parents:</p>

<p>Remember: You are not trying to deceive anyone.
The first thing you should know is that we are not recommending that you 1) pretend to be sick or 2) skip school and go hang out under the bridge downtown. That’s JV stuff. This is about preserving your mental health and doing better in your classes, so we encourage you to be up front about your motivation.</p>

<p>Plan ahead.
In case you haven’t noticed, people tend to be grumpy in the morning. This includes your parents, who are forced to work to support your uncontrollable texting habits. You may not want to spring your brilliant idea on them five minutes before they head out the door. Instead, pick a choice moment to relay that you are feeling stressed out and getting a little behind on your studies, and you’re wondering if you might take a day off next week to catch up, “if you need it.” Who knows, they might be feeling the same way and take the day off with you.</p>

<p>Adults do it all the time.
Building on the previous point, when you have a job, there are things called “personal days” that allow you to blow off the daily grind on a whim. And you still get paid! (We’re not kidding: These days are given to you by your company, along with your flame-resistant body suit and GPS implant.) Students should have this option as well. Exercise caution when using this as part of your argument, lest you run into every parent’s go-to reply, “When you’re an adult, you can do whatever you want.” (Note: Sadly, this is not an actual privilege of adulthood.)</p>

<p>Pick a good day to do it.
If you’re going to miss a lot of important work by staying home, choose a different day. Also, don’t stay home if you have a big test or paper due. Duh. It’s too obvious and people will think you’re just lazy. Which you might be. Just sayin’.</p>

<p>Don’t forget the all-important follow-through.
The best way to show that staying home is helpful is to be productive. In addition to enjoying the lack of pointless torment and getting to eat a lunch that wasn’t stored in a metal tray for five hours, try to accomplish something school-related, or better yet, several things school-related. Resist the urge to watch crappy depressing midday television or surf the crappy depressing midday Internet. The worst thing would be to take a day off and then go back to school even farther behind, in which case you’d really be up Poop Creek without a paddling device and it’ll be your own fault, so don’t blame us.</p>

<p>What do you think? Would taking a day off save your sanity?</p>

2

<p>Of course skipping a day can help you. I did this last year and ended up 1st in my class because of it. I skipped probably 25-30 days of school. It’s kind of an art in doing so… you have to know when to skip and how to quickly make up what you miss. Personally I thought skipping on test and paper days are the best because it gives you more time to study/work on the paper. I often found that in many of my classes, all of the “learning” was done at home (through a textbook, etc.) and in class we just talked about random stuff or reinforced the learning. So I decided it’d be a better use of my time to just concentrate the learning at home by staying home and working on getting ahead in the textbook, etc and it served me very very well.</p>

3

<p>I’ve always used to skip days when big papers were due. Procrastination at its finest.</p>

<p>That is until I entered APUSH. The teacher requires all homework to be sent to his e-mail when you miss that day. Fail.</p>

4

<p>My gpa was a 4.0 freshman year. Then I discovered sparknotes. Now it’s a 3.8.</p>

5

<p>^ Had you not discovered sparknotes, it would be 3.5 =]</p>

6

<p>I’ve done it a few times, yeah. Usually it’s in combination with a semi-sick day (you know, when you’re not technically sick enough to stay home because of that alone but “I have a slight fever and a History test today” is a valid excuse together), and my parents are all for it. They know I like school and like doing well and can time myself and stuff, so they trust me to know when I need a day off. It’s nice.</p>

7

<p>I’ve been telling people this for years. I usually call it a “mental health day” to relieve stress when the load becomes too much. I really didn’t do it on days where tests, major projects, or papers were due because my teachers were ridiculous about that kind of stuff (no excuses, unless you were dying and have a hospital note, otherwise turn it in early if you know you’re going to be absent), but I did do it when I knew it would be better for my grades if I stayed home rather than going to school. Sometimes it was just impossible to get all the HW done, so I’d rather take a day off and not fail horribly. </p>

<p>In my first two years of HS my mom could tell when I was overworked and stressed before I could, and she’d suggest I’d stay home even though my younger overachieving self thought this was such a cop out. Since then I’ve learned to use these days to my advantage, even though senioritis is making it a lot harder to distinguish between stress relief day and laziness.</p>

8

<p>I hate when people skip to stay home and do work. Especially on test days. It’s their fault they aren’t prepared. I’m quite sure I’ve never skipped school for sickness, real or fake. The only time I miss is for a class trip, or extracuricular.</p>

9

<p>Hahaha yes. My parents even tell me to stay home. I don’t do it too often though, because its hard for me to make up everything.</p>

<p>^In my school, if you don’t come to school after the day of a class trip, you get suspended : /</p>

10

<p>Haha, why wouldn’t you come the day after a class trip? that’s two days off.</p>

<p>Well, I do understand if they are in Youth and Government. Our students get back late tonight, and man don’t come Monday due to lack of sleep from the weekend of it.</p>

11

<p>Words cannot describe how much I love premarital cookie sex.</p>

12

<p>Invoyable you are so weird! What is wrong with you!!??</p>

13

<p>Ha. Our teachers require everything be due on the date provided regardless of whether or not you’re actually at school. If you’re sick, it needs to be in either the day before or emailed the day of its due date.</p>

<p>Why would you skip school for something you procrastinated on? What do you expect people to say? “Oh, I’m sorry you can’t handle life, here’s an extra day to recuperate?” </p>

<p>You’re setting yourself up to get owned by those more efficient and tenacious than you.</p>

14

<p>I flat out tell most of my teachers that I’m not going to school the next day because I’m going crazy with stress.</p>

<p>You get a day off from school, come back refreshed, and it’s like having a 3/2 day school week (I usually end up missing a Tuesday or Wednesday).</p>

<p>It helps. It’s probably contributed to my 4.0, and it’s kept me from burning out completely.</p>

15

<p>lmao, i first tried this this year, & it was awesome. i got like 3 apush assignments done+tons of apbio reading+math stuff+english stuff. school is so pointless. it doesn’t help me learn anything & it just detracts from the hours i could be spending doing the ridiculous amounts of work we receive…
p.s. sparknotes is awesome btw : D</p>

16

<p>Sparknotes is awesome… unless it doesn’t have your book that you’re assigned to write a paper on but never read. =]</p>

17

<p>This is great. I started taking days off in 10th grade because I hated my first three bells (Gym/Health, French, and APUSH). We didn’t do anything in those classes. Gym is pointless, health is stupid, I pay absolutely no attention in French class and still rank in the top 10 nationally, and my APUSH teacher told silly stories about his farm instead of teaching. So sometimes I liked to relax and come in for Pre-Calc, Chemistry, Orchestra, and English. No harm, no foul.</p>

<p>I still do it now. It’s very rare for me to miss a whole day unless I’m legit ill but since I don’t have first bell, I’m just missing French (which I still beast at) and AP English, wherein my teacher, just like with APUSH, does nothing. So I come in for my other 3 APs and Orchestra.</p>

<p>You really do have to plan your off days though. I cannot miss slide notes in Art History and tests are really difficult to make up since they have slides. I missed an essay once (completely legitimately. I had the flu and my temperature got up to 103.8 F) in there and I don’t like doing that. So I try to miss review days in there. I generally don’t like missing notes in Human Geo because then, I have to read the book, which I don’t do. But now my teacher has very little left to teach before the AP, so we do less notes in a day and I can easily get those from a friend. Missing Calculus is always bad, but it’s better to miss the stuff at the beginning of a chapter because I can probably read the book and figure it out. So I just have to try to coordinate all that stuff.</p>

18

<p>yeah…we have these things called attendence policies, and if you miss over 4 days in one semester, the highest grade you can get is a 69. Same thing for tardies (3 add up to 1 absense). I think it’s stupid, as well as some of the teachers. If you can get good grades without ever coming to school, more power to you. I know I get a lot more work done at home.</p>

19

<p>whjsxc that sucks man. at my school I think you begin getting in trouble when you miss over 12 days in one semester haha and lates don’t matter</p>

20

<p>I cannot love SparkNotes…</p>

<p>because I have CliffNotes! Heh.</p>