Your head sinks into the cold pillow as you click off the lamp sitting beside your bed and finally give all of the muscles in your body the chance to relax. And right as you’re drifting off, you quickly list tomorrow’s classes to make sure that every assignment has been done, quality disregarded.
It hits you.
That 30 page reading you’ve been putting off for a week needs to be done, with notes, by first period. You then have three options:
1) Get out from under your warm cocoon of a bed to retrieve your textbook and stay up at least another hour reading and taking notes.
2) Set your alarm tomorrow morning for 5:00 am so you can get out of bed and do as much as you can, no guarantee that you will finish in time.
3) Groan “whatever” and roll over into a deep sleep.
If you choose either of the first two, you can forget about makeup and tomorrow’s outfit might include Ugg boots and a sweatshirt. But is that better than the chance of the dreaded Pop Quiz?
It’s hard to say.
It’s one thing if your teacher gives you the famous wink. C’mon, you know what I’m talking about.
“Don’t forget to do the reading!”
Wink.
“You might see this coming up very soon!”
Wink.
“Remember this!”
Wink.
Everyone reacts differently. Whether it’s by whining, begging or silently stressing about how to fit in the extra time for studying.
But without warning, when pop quizzes are truly what their name entails, they are awful. When you really don’t see them coming and aren’t prepared, it can turn a good day into something much, much worse.
In the end, yes, I do understand why they exist. They help teachers enforce homework assignments, they allow for extra grades to be put into HomeAccess, and they can be used as checkups so that the teacher can see how the students are doing with new material. But can you blame me for hating them?
With all of the fuss that our school and teachers make about keeping our stress level under control, don’t give us pop quizzes! Yes assessments are necessary, but let’s at least make the wink a requirement. There’s no need to throw a curveball into our already hectic weeks. We shouldn’t be graded on something that we weren’t told to prepare for.
