For my seniors, the final semester of their high school career has just begun. For a lot of kids, that means it’s time for a victory lap. Time to stop running hard and chill.

College applications are mostly in; some kids have already received acceptances. The temptation is to say, OK, I’ve done enough. I’ve earned the right to spend the last few months of my free and public educational career doing a whole lot of nothing.

The word for that feeling is a word I wish we didn’t have - senioritis.

I don’t like that word because it makes it sound like the decision to stop working hard isn’t a choice that can be controlled. It’s a disease, the result of a virus or some kind of infectious bacteria for which there’s no inoculation.

Here’s the problem - school is hard. Kids are tired. If they really did all the homework they were assigned (and some of them actually do) they’d be up until one or two in the morning most nights when their alarm clocks are typically set to start blasting around six a.m. That’s after many kids don’t get home until seven p.m. because of participation in an extra-curricular activity. And many of those activities are not just time-consuming, but physically exhausting. After my department meeting last night, I left school at five, just in time to coincide with members of the Pioneer Girls Track Team running 200 meter sprints through the hallways. Those sprints did not look easy.

The problem with a word like senioritis is that kids are looking for any reason that sounds legit to stop fighting a battle that’s exhausting them. If they believe, on any level, that there’s something floating in the air that justifies a decision to start becoming lazy, it’s awfully convenient to say they’ve caught it. Heck, some kids will claim they’ve been suffering from senioritis since a month into freshman year.

I think it’s natural, even healthy for students who are in their last semester of high school to feel like they’re ready to leave. They should be ready to leave, right? It’s what we’ve been preparing them for since pre-school. We don’t want them staying stuck in the drama and intrigue of high school like some cast member of Beverly Hills 90210 who’s 28 and balding and still worried about who he’s going to take to prom. Yet, we wouldn’t want those kids pounding out their 200-meter sprints to break their strides with 25 meters to go, because there would be consequences if they did. There are consequences for senioritis too.

Consider a class like mine populated by about 75 percent seniors. If three-fourths of my class stops making a full effort, my class collapses and the kids who aren’t seniors get little out of it too. Truthfully, if one-fourth of my students don’t work hard, maybe even a fifth, it has a devastating effect on the rest of the class. The educational experience isn’t just about my connecting to individual students and feeding those kids what I know. It’s about my creating a learning environment where all the students in the room learn and grow from each other. If we have even a handful of kids opting out of that process, it makes the whole class less productive. Less interesting.

Most students don’t get that. The fact that their lack of effort hurts other people isn’t really an idea that meshes with our nation’s capitalistic mindset. Most kids think their efforts in class affect only themselves and that if they’re screwing up, they’re the only ones paying for it, sort of like a hedge-fund manager who squanders a few million dollars, shrugs his shoulders and says, oh, I had a bad day, there goes some of my bonus, when he might have just caused a whole bunch of other people to lose their jobs or houses.

Students should know, however, that as individuals they’re likely to suffer consequences too. Those track-athletes who are sprinting through the Pioneer hallways understand that if they want to run in college, the last thing they want to do as they near the end of their high school careers is to slow down. On the contrary, they want to get faster than ever because the competition in college will be tougher. Yet, we don’t think that way when it comes to academics. Junior year is often regarded as the most important academic year because those are the grades colleges will be looking at. While there may be some practical truth to that point of view, the fact is that if students ease off the gas for the second half of senior year, they - counting the summer - can be falling out of the practice of good study habits for as long as eight months just when they’re about to enter a new learning environment where the academics are bound to be significantly tougher.

I speak from personal experience when I say lousy high school study habits can transfer into college and it’s not easy to break them. I was fortunate, or perhaps unfortunate enough, to get into a university I wanted to go to in December of my senior year. While I continued to work hard in my English and history classes, I pretty much let everything else on the academic side slide and, from January on, spent most of my time concentrating on being a better baseball player. While that made me ready to hit collegiate pitching, I didn’t know what the heck I was doing in my college classes and no longer had effective study habits to help me figure it out. I struggled for the first year and a half and really didn’t start turning things around until I tore my knee up and couldn’t play ball anymore. I’m not saying it takes an injury to recapture good study habits, and, sure, some kids will screw around in high school and do just fine in college from day one, but I suspect they’re exceptions. My sense is that blowing off half a year of high school generally leads to a rocky college start.

Next week I’ll talk about what I think we can do about senioritis, and what I think may be some darker underlying causes that foment it in the first place. As for the rest of this week, I’m going to spend much of it trying to persuade my seniors that senioritis is a lot like writer’s block. It’s not something in the air that overtakes them. It’s a choice not to make an effort. A choice to quit.

Jeff Kass teaches Creative Writing at Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor and at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, and directs the Literary Arts Programs at the Neutral Zone, including the VOLUME Youth Poetry Project, which meets every Thursday night at 7 p.m. He will post new blog entries every Tuesday and Thursday morning throughout the school year.