There are many words I would use to describe junior year so far. To sum them up best I would like to quote a popular role model of youth today, Miley Cyrus in saying: “There’s always going to be another mountain.” If I have learned anything from this first quarter, it would be that yes Miley, there are a lot of mountains.

It does not matter what classes you have or what time in the day you have them, the work is always there. A continuous stream of assignments and tests are upon you and suddenly your staring at grades you don’t like a week before the end of the quarter. I’m not drawing directly from personal experience but the general gist is there. Beginning of the year starts with what you might expect from any other grade: really high expectations and not so high results.

Here’s the catch, the grades finalized in junior year are somehow supposed to predict the rest of our lives or something like that. At about this time in what seems to be an annual tradition, students rush to their guidance counselors like flies to a lantern and do anything to drop the classes they’re “failing”; doing about as much work to quickly drop the classes as it would have taken to get good grades, but that is mostly speculation. As you can imagine, the student to teacher ratio in each class becomes smaller and smaller while the pressure falls upon those that choose to stick it out. What happens next, if I could venture a guess, would be yet another cycle of what I just described.

At Langley High School, at least, junior year is not just another year of the high school experience, but more of a right of passage into the rest of our lives. In other words of the holy one, Miley Cyrus, junior year is just one enormous mountain that has only one direction to reach the other side, up.