The senior slumps into the classroom and puts his head down on his desk.

The senior slouches in the classroom, eyes red from being out late the night before - or from doing something illegal in the parking lot.

The senior’s not in the classroom at all.

The senior shows up, but mostly just to flirt. No homework, no notebook.

The senior does homework, but not much of it. A sloppy few sentences at best. The senior is not apologetic about her lack of effort. Quite the opposite. The senior is self-righteous about having earned the right to blow off her assignments. How dare the teacher try to make her feel guilty?

All these sights, I know, will prove common as the weather warms and we turn toward the end of the school year. As I mentioned in last week’s post, on one level it’s both natural and healthy for students to sense that by the time their last semester rolls around, high school has begun to feel redundant and constricting. They’re ready to move on to a new challenge. However, this feeling is not enough to account for the degree of negative behavior we see, for the precipitous decline in work ethic on the part of so many students. I suspect there’s something more nefarious at work, an underlying force that goads many kids into making choices they’d never dream of making even a few months earlier.

The thing is, the second half of senior year is when consequences for what people have been doing throughout their high school careers become apparent. Kids who’ve been buckling down and faithfully doing their work begin to receive acceptances from colleges. The future appears to open brightly in front of them as they choose between numerous attractive options. They begin to wear sweatshirts featuring the logos of schools they might attend. On the other hand, for kids who’ve been skating along, getting by with grades just high enough to remain eligible for whatever extra-curricular activity they enjoy most, or maybe just good enough to keep moving from grade to grade, a different picture forms. They don’t want anyone asking about where they’re going to school next year because they don’t know. Maybe they’ll take a few classes somewhere; maybe they’ll try to find some kind of half-decent job. Rather than opening up with possibility, the future appears to offer the depressing prospect of a whole lot of nothing much.

At the same time, other realities begin to set in as well. It becomes obvious that that state championship in wrestling or football’s never going to happen. Maybe getting off the bench at all isn’t going to happen. The four-year dream of playing the lead in the big musical isn’t going to come true. The girl you’ve had your eye on since ninth grade actually isn’t going to kick her knuckleheaded boyfriend to the curb and realize she’s been in love with you the whole time.

Kids looking at narrowing options, at what once seemed like an endless expanse of chances to atone for their mistakes, suddenly drawing to a close, don’t want to walk around feeling horrible all the time. It’s their senior year after all, the mythical moment the movies have always depicted as a highlight reel of carefree frolic. So how come they feel anxious?

Rather than confront the answer to that question - which would involve both admitting the folly of their previous choices and somehow quickly learning the study habits that might occasion a last-minute turnaround - kids who aren’t looking at a whole lot of appealing future avenues do the equivalent of what sore losers do on the playground when the game’s going against them. They quit. They pick up the ball and go home. They loudly trumpet that school’s a bunch of B.S. anyway and only a sucker would care about it.

Unfortunately, this attitude has a way of growing infectious. Kids who have been partying for a long time instead of studying tend to wield a fair amount of social influence. They know where to find the bonfires. Kids who have been studying see these other kids blithely skipping class, laughing and joking about what they’ve been doing instead of hitting the books, and they begin to wonder if they actually are suckers. They begin to wonder what they’ve been missing. They don’t see that the partying kids might actually be envious of their successes. They just know they’re already itching to assert some independence, to break out of the same-old same-old and to try something new, so why not try screwing up?

As educators, this is the point where we need to offer innovative solutions. Scolding and prodding won’t work because scolding and prodding are precisely what kids are ready to rebel against. Banging our collective foreheads against file cabinets is merely painful. I like the idea of offering seniors educational opportunities that aren’t the same-old same-old. Alternative schedules that make it easier for students to cross-register and take college classes. Independent studies and projects that get them outside the classroom, even off-campus and into the community where they can get credit for work-studies, internships, apprenticeships and community service. We do a lot of that already, but I think we need to do more. It’s not that second-semester seniors want to stop learning, but they do want more independence to forge their own paths. They want the responsibility to make choices that don’t feel circumscribed. Why not let them? There’s truth to the notion that the same routine can become brain-numbing after three-and-a-half years. If we want kids to resist the temptation of quitting, why not offer more chances for them to design a schedule where they have enhanced personal stake?

About a decade ago, I remember seeing a group of four seniors who would gather in the mornings in the hour before lunch under a tree close to Pioneer’s front entrance. They were, they said, taking an independent study in Philosophy where they met each day to talk about big philosophical questions like the meaning of life. That’s the kind of thing that would never happen at Pioneer now. It would be deemed those kids have holes in their schedules and they’d be forced to register for additional classes they have no interest in attending.

I have no idea what those kids discussed. Maybe they just talked about who they wanted to take to Prom. Maybe they talked about Kant and Heidegger and whether there’s such a thing as justifiable war. I do know they were there every day it wasn’t raining, gathered under that tree, talking. I do know one of them went on to Yale and did wonderfully and is now a successful graphic designer in the Bay Area.

Sure, that kind of experience may not be right every kid. But sitting cramped in a classroom as the ice melts and the high school career draws to a close won’t work for a lot of kids either. Why not allow students the chance to search for what will work? Why not encourage the second half of senior year to be a time of exploration instead of what can feel like painfully slow expiration?

Why not reclaim the ball and test the ways it can bounce it in different directions?

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 7pm. He will post new blog entries every Tuesday and Thursday morning throughout the school year.