According to NCSSM.tumblr.com, this is a sample senior schedule from about 3 years ago.
No, I’m not a huge tumblr fan. But it’s a good place to find NCSSM-related whining information. And it’s not all whining, some of the stuff is really pretty great.
Such a shame it’s on tumblr.
Anyways, the schedule:
A lot’s been going on recently, but I’ve had a lethargic feeling. The school year’s almost over, so I’m barely doing work, but I still have too much to take time to post.
The truth is, I’ve done something that I got so annoyed about: I got in, and I stopped being so committed, which is bad, since the plan was to document my journey into AND THROUGH NCSSM.
So, three primary things have happened recently. Each of them deserves its own post, so I’ll take them on one at a time. Reasonably, I should name each post separately, but since this introduction applies to all of them and most of them are delayed, I’ll name it after all of them and put it into parts. Don’t get all down in the dumps because you wanted three stories. Now you get three stories, but it’s like three bowls of ice cream instead of three scoops because I won’t get tired.
1. The senior sister.
I’ve always wanted a sister. I thought it would be the coolest thing in the world. I stopped wanting a sister after a while, since I’d want my sister to be about my age, and that wasn’t going to happen. Kids don’t work like that. If you’re confused, ask your parents about the birds and the bees. I’ll give you the basics: You can’t order a 7-10 year old child and have the stork drop it off. The stork only drops off babies and it takes forever to fly all the way from Neverland.
The stork’s from Neverland, right?
Anyways, I stopped wanting a sister and started wanting a dog. After a while of not getting a dog, I realized that I don’t want to clean up after a dog, so then I wanted a therapist because I’m clearly insane. Midway through wanting a therapist, I got a senior sister.
How’d I do that? Well, she posted on the Facebook page and I sent her a message about her post and that was fun. That was less than a month ago. Now we’ve exchanged like 2,000 messages over Facebook, and over too many hours. But she’s awesome, so I asked her to be my senior sister. She said yes.
Sorta sucks for her because I lack people skills and common sense, and I know too much about the school (though I’ve recently discovered that I don’t know as much as I thought I did), BUT she’s excited and I’m excited and it’s all great.
But wait, there’s more!
So, I went to commencement today. Finally, an advantage to living in CD4: You can go other years’ graduations and it’s no big deal. I came late (apparently 5 minutes early is “late”) so I had to stand for like 2 hours straight, and I was alone, so I just stood there and listened and pretended I was supposed to be there. Honestly, it wasn’t that awkward. The speaker was great. Listening to the names of 300-some graduating seniors called out and watching them cross the stage was much less great. But those are my grandseniors, so… it totally had this really deep meaning that I don’t know about yet.
After the ceremony was the part that I really came for: meeting my senior sister.
That was the moment that I had been panicking about all week. But by then I had calmed down quite a bit. I talked to her a little bit, but she didn’t get all of my jokes so I just looked stupid. After mildly embarrassing myself, I also jokingly complained, which then made me sound like a whiny *bad word*.
Sidenote about me and cursing: You may have noticed that I’ve been leaning more toward bad words lately. There’s a reason for that. I hate the summer. I love the winter. I also have cycles where I don’t curse at all, and some where I curse a ton and make lots of sexual references. In the spirit of family-friendliness, I’ll try to keep the cursing and sexual references on the low side, but that interrupts my flow, man.
You can’t interrupt the flow.
Anyways, after fully embarrassing myself, I met her parents, which frightened me because A) my social incapacity also applied to parents, B) They were quite obviously busy, and C) they were friendly. Friendly adults scare me. Also, D) I had nothing to say to them. I much preferred meeting her boyfriend, one of my grandseniors, who was quite clearly contemplating stabbing me in my sleep.
Thankfully, there’s no chance I’ll be rooming with him, since he’s graduating.
I met some of her other friends. She showed me around a little bit, but I more or less knew where stuff was from my 2 tours. I embarrassed myself again by saying that I understood one of her conversations with her friends about classes, and they just looked at me like “Shut up, you’re a rising Junior, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” But they didn’t interrupt me, so my lack of social skills was incredibly evident.
And then I ate with her and her boyfriend. And went home. Whee!
Okay, something that’s been bothering me a little bit recently are the placements. I never posted about my placements, but they were generally as high as I could expect.
Getting a higher placement doesn’t mean you’re smarter. Someone who’s coming into multivariable calculus isn’t even necessarily better at math than someone coming into Algebra 3. It’s about what you have experience in; if multivariable kid’s parents signed her up for a math class every summer at Duke, but Algebra 3 kid’s school only offers through pre-algebra, and he had to work in his parents’ restaurant, multi-kid isn’t necessarily smarter or better at Math. She just had more exposure, parental support, and better exposure. Algebra kid could be a math whizz, but got his placement because he didn’t have the exposure.
*Note that I am not part of the example, as I was placed into BC Calc with Advanced Topics.*
A few days ago, a freshman started talking to me. She asked me if I’m going to Science and Math next year.
The rest is sort of a blur. I think she said “That’s so cool”, but I may be mis-remembering it and making it sound better. Anyways, we talked for a little bit, and it made me so excited because it’s come full circle. I used to be someone who wanted to go, looking in from the outside, always so excited when a student posted or contacted me through the blog. I wanted so badly to talk to a student, I loved talking to students, I had them up on a pedestal, each and every one of them.
I’m not quite a student yet, but I got in. I’m going. I’m now the person I put on a pedestal.
On a mildly unrelated note…
It feels nice to have come full circle, but I’m still making mock schedules; I’ll have my real one in about a month, but I wasted hours looking at when courses were offered and trying to fit my schedule into the course offerings and times courses were offered last year. But at least I realized something important: I don’t want to do Research as much as I thought I did. It’s much more time consuming than I thought, and it takes up so many spots for classes. Yeah, research looks awesome and I think I’d like it a lot, but… I also have a list of 50 classes I want to take, and I already can’t take them all. Taking out 8 trimesters for one extended research experience may or may not be worth it.
I’m guessing that it’s not.
I’m sure everyone’s heard NCSSM called that: Nerd school.
At welcome day, when I was talking to people, it was clear. We all shared something. We shared that we weren’t top-tier on the social ladder. We shared that this wasn’t something anyone other than an intellectual would appreciate. We shared that hesitation, that unsureness about whether yes, all of the people in this room were nerds. We shared that need for approval.
I saw it in the eyes of the people I talked to, their gazes, the way they talked about their extracurriculars. I saw it in the way that they joked, the way that they spoke, and, most of all, I saw it in myself.
Now, I’m going to stop talking about what we all shared and start talking about me, because that’s what I do best.
Right now, that need for approval and hesitation are going through me like crazy.
I’m waiting in a perpetual state of fear for my big screw-up, because I’m going to screw up. Maybe I say the wrong thing on the facebook page, or in a message to a Junior. Maybe I make a post that no one relates to. Maybe I bring one box too many on move in day, or my grade drop this 4th quarter screws over my year grades and NCSSM rejects me. Maybe it just screws over my year-end grades and that’s bad enough. Maybe I don’t get a hold of myself by next year. Maybe I ask someone to be my senior sister too soon, or harass duhbagel too much with my emails and texts, or I do any of another of 100 million stupid things that I do that don’t fit.
And then I think… this is nerd school. Everyone’s different, everyone’s special, I can still make mistakes, but I’m going into a school with 700 other versions of me. Okay, not carbon-copies, but we’re similar. We share something. We share that we wanted to be unicorns, and now we are Unicorns, or at least very close to it.
I’m not saying that this is going to prevent me from making mistakes, but I am saying that it’ll give me some breathing room. Just a little bit.
NCSSM’s motto is “Accept the Greater Challenge”, right?
i.e. academic challenge. That’s what people think, at least; Accept the challenge of our academic courses because when it comes to school and women’s soccer, NCSSM is just on another level from everyone else. That’s the impression. I don’t go there yet, so I can’t confirm or deny that, but what I can say is that the motto isn’t restricted to that.
Plenty of kids – the majority of kids – are going there for the academics. They are accepting the challenge of having to stay awake and focused during class, homework that takes effort, and teachers who teach new things.
Note that I said they. I’m not one of them. I was blessed enough to go to a school that (I hear) is comparable to NCSSM. So… what challenge am I accepting?
I’m accepting the challenge to get over myself. I told myself that Welcome Day would be a sneak peek, but it wasn’t. It was another day of me being me. Sure, more people I knew said hey to me during Welcome Day than in an average school day, I had more conversations, and more people (I hope) liked me, but those are changes in my environment, not in me. That isn’t my challenge.
My challenge is to change myself, and on Welcome Day, I didn’t change myself. I was still fishing for compliments, being jealous of people more intelligent than me, trying to be the center of attention, and, in general, not getting over myself. Changing my clothes and my environment aren’t enough for me to complete this challenge.
Besides, if I could complete my challenge in one day, that wouldn’t be much of a challenge.
A NCSSM Journey 