Senior Excellence “The Experience”….

As a senior in high school I get the “honor” of filling out a Senior Superlative for the yearbook. You know, that list of who’s who. Class clown, biggest brain, most likely to suck egg. But I don’t get it. Superlative by definition means excellence, when we’re not talking about grammar at least. Thus, we are saying that those being elected as “Class Clown” “Best Eyes” “Most Holy Art Thou” and such are the school’s excellent senior students? So we are implicating the fact that by goofing off in class or by being pretty these people are excellent while others aren’t. Right?

Sure, it’s some high school rite of passage to do this for the yearbook, but can’t we do it without being stereotypical about it? Obviously looking at the list of Senior Superlatives in front of me “Biggest Brain” is going to go to that girl who’s been known as the brainiac all her life even though she doesn’t want to be considered that any longer. The “Most Spirited” is going to go to the head cheerleader and the football captain. “Prettiest Eyes” will go to the most popular girl in the school, not because her eyes are pretty, but because people want to compliment her. Then there are things like “Teachers pet” and “Most changed since freshman year” that can be offensive to people. Who really wants to be known as that person who could get whatever they wanted from their teachers…not me.

All eighteen years of my life, and my four years of high school, I have been told that we shouldn’t stereotype people. We shouldn’t judge people. We shouldn’t categorize people. Isn’t that what these “Senior Superlatives” are doing? We focus more on the popularity side of high school when we look to categorize people, but what about the average Joe? Categorization is one of the first stages of genocide. Not that I would ever expect for something this simple to start something THAT massive, but stranger things have happened. But maybe if we focused on the REAL definition of superlative instead of the one that will give the high school kids “kicks.”

I know this girl. She’s been a Girl Scout all her life, and she worked really hard and received her Gold Award which is I guess the highest ranking award girls can get through scouting. That’s forty hours of work she put into her community to improve it and herself. Looking at her she’s a normal girl. She’s not overly brainy. She has normal eyes and normal hair. She dresses as most high school kids do: jeans or sweatpants. She’s not particularly artsy, sporty, or spirited, but she’s put so much work into improving the things around her. She never got recognized for her excellence in that field. And here I am sitting and looking at my list of Senior Superlatives and there is no category of excellence for her and her work.

In my eyes being pretty, being sincere, and being smart, while all being nice things, aren’t excellence. They are more of gifts given to us by the good grace of God. And by abusing our democracy in America to tell people what they are and are not isn’t excellence either. As high school students, with our raging hormones and major cases of “Get me out of here I’m sick of this place,” we can get hurt by these categorizations of our classmates. Because what if you were that boy who was pushing harder than anyone you knew to get to your future. What if you stayed up until midnight every night working on scholarships, financial aid applications, that novel you have been working on in hopes to someday get published, but because you are a little shy people don’t know you, or because you don’t play football no one cares and you don’t get “Most Likely to Succeed?” Wouldn’t you be hurt? Wouldn’t you be put down so low that graduation almost, if even only for a second, felt pointless?

For now a week of my life I have had to sit and listen to groups of kids “plot” out their superlative lists.

“Hey let’s vote her for this category because she’ll hate it,” Or “Lisa is class flirt because I think she’s a slut. Put her down! Maybe she’ll cry when she gets it!”

Yes, I’m not joking around. Those are the things that I have heard this week while superlatives were out there. High school kids are brutal and mean.

Why am I sitting here, at my computer complaining about all this? No, it’s not because I already know I won’t get a spot on our list. But that is true. There is no category after all for, “Most likely to start a riot” or “Most likely to picket the White House,” although if there were THAT would be excellence. THAT takes courage! (I’m just joshing.) Anyway, I am saying this because I know there are a lot of senior out there who are getting ready for their yearbooks who agree that this senior list isn’t really all that fun and games. Some people don’t agree with it. I’m not saying “let’s take it out of our school systems.” NO! I understand that although maybe one percent of the population hates them, 99% of seniors really enjoy doing it. It’s part of “the experience.” I just think that maybe it’s about time more thought goes into these sort of things. Let’s take away the offensive material, and put the ones that matter most.

“Most community service”
“Most work for his/her school”
“High Honors”
“High Lettering”

Get rid of those Best this and best that and most likely to do this and most likely to do that. Those aren’t the things we should focus on. It’s about time we stopped with false excellence.