Ceremonial Breaking of The Pencil

Let me start off by saying this:
The last three years of my life has come to an end. That's what this feels like. It didn't feel like this at graduation, because we still had finals to study for. But now? I can still remember my first time walking into Wisdom. I was intimidated. I got lost when looking for classes. I still remember my first words, because they're significant to me:

"Cheese Girl." Yeah. My first words that I would remember for the next three years of my life were "cheese girl", and I said it because Gabriella Lucas, a girl who went to Abbey Lane with me, always loved the cafeteria's cheese blocks. I hated them, so when I got them, I gave them to her. So when I entered the class where she was sitting next to me, the first words that came out of my mouth in the school that I would gain friends in, lose friends in, learn things in, impress people in, disappoint people in, and become myself in were "Cheese Girl."

I'm gonna try and make my high school first words a little more memorable (well, Cheese Girl is still very memorable, I mean to say a little more normal.)

So, you've probably noticed the title by now. In fact, it was probably one of the first things you read. "Ceremonial Breaking of The Pencil". People do it all the time, but for me and a group of friends, it's more than just "lol skool ovar lets break the penc1L!!!11!1!11!1!one1!11!!!!!1" It's meaningful. Let's go to a flashback:

I'm sitting in the final final of the first year of the next three years of education. I'm asleep. Yeah. I fell asleep during the final, because I completed all the work in the first 45 minutes (and I got a 97 on the final, too, so don't think I did bad.) I wake up when everyone's leaving (they didn't plan to wake me up, it was a funny moment) and leave. The day has ended. The semester has ended. It feels so... final. So, I break a pencil and take the eraser end and hand it to a friend. He throws it to the ceiling of the school (and almost makes it, too). I explain to the other three people that it had meaning. I didn't break the pencil just for the sake of it.

Here's the meaning behind me, Jason Colato, Japjot Josan, and Brian Taranto's ceremonial breaking of the pencil:

• breaking the pencil signifies the ending of education for the grade you're in. this is the most obvious one.
• one must always throw away the eraser end (preferably give it to Brian so he can attempt to throw it to the top of the building) to signify they are willing to write with no eraser and stand by what they say (i.e not erasing anything including memories, words, feelings, etc.)
• one must then take the pencil end home and write something with it. I still have what I wrote in 6th grade. It says, "well played, Arnav. well played." I don't have what I wrote in 7th grade (and don't remember it) and I have yet to come up with something to write that summarizes my experiences this year.
• breaking pencils at the end of the school year looks like something only immature students trying to look cool would do, but we took it to a whole new level. We gave it the breath of Life. We gave it reason to be.
• breaking pencils is fun

The end of school has come. I tweeted this earlier and was thinking about it, and it seems pretty cool:

"those steps that I took to exit that school today will be the last steps I will EVER take as a student of wisdom lane. deep stuff, man"

Grades

Grades always give me trouble lately. I feel like I was kind of born with all the knowledge I needed up until 6th grade or something, because up until mid-7th grade, I never had to show effort. I'm lucky I wasn't like that up till 8th grade, because these last 2 years have given me time to straighten myself up. I've had to learn how to study later than everyone because I never had to study before this. So, high school should be a breeze up till sophomore year. During sophomore year I'm gonna be suicidal. It's probably inevitable. Every genius I know was suicidal during sophomore year. I don't know why. Maybe it's just the year that people kinda give up? I don't know. Whatever. I'll make it through.

We had English finals today. They were harder than I thought. I was a bit distracted. I used a story that I didn't study for, because I couldn't remember the name of the main character of the story I studied for. Of all the things I studied for the story "The Contender", themes, plot, etc., I never thought to memorize the main character's name. I had a few names in my head but was anxious and didn't want to botch the name and ruin the essay, so I used a story I didn't study for. The whole grammar stuff was easy. I'm a blogger, coder, and redditor. If I didn't have grammar, I would have almost nothing. I actually didn't read two of the books fully either, so I think my grades in the class are pretty awesome. Since the final counts for 1/5 of the grade and I got to choose what I used, I think I passed that pretty easily.

Social Studies finals tomorrow. It also happens to be the last day of school. Social Studies is too easy for me. It's just memorizing facts and memorizing them in chronological order. I'm good at memorizing things. I memorized 50 something digits of pi for pi day (3.14, March 14th) in math class. I almost won, but got second place because some curses go here girl memorized more than me. Still, no one came close to me. The closest was below half of my amount. I still feel accomplished.

So yeah, grades. They're important. They determine where people go, who they interact with, what they do, what they CAN do, etc.. Some people say, "oh, grades are just a number, they don't express anything about anyone." While I don't think grades can say how smart someone is, they do say something about them. They say how responsible a person is. How consistent a person is. Intelligence alone can't be measured properly, but consistency combined with responsibility are obviously the closest things we've figured out how to measure so far. The SAT score and stuff is different. That doesn't measure responsibility or consistency. It measures retention in my opinion. How much can a given student retain from an SATPrep book? How much vocabulary? Of course, that's all just a silly naive 13 year-old's opinion. If you know what I mean.