Blaike Young The PSATs aren’t fun, but when you add the fact that instead of being able to go home afterwards, you’re expected to stay and participate in whatever activity is planned, makes the day even more irritating. The 7:45 call time marks the beginning of what will be a very long day. You sit down for several hours and fill in bubble after bubble, hearing the flipping of the pages that makes you believe you are behind, continuously trying to find a place to put your legs if you are on either side of the table instead of in the middle, and you look forward to finishing and relaxing. But instead of going home and catching up on sleep or homework, you stay at school. In some way or another, you probably feel like a schlub because you either have circles proportionally bigger than the answer choice bubbles under your eyes, you’re wearing sweatpants or a sweatshirt that probably has a paint stain here or there or several holes, or you’re very behind on homework that has piled up because the end of the quarter is only a day away. It’s almost sad, but the reason we want to go home is to do schoolwork. We don’t want to go home to play videogames or watch TV; we need those quality few hours to be productive. No offense to those who plan the post-PSAT activity, but we would be accomplishing a lot more at home. The junior activity this year was a competition between advisories that started in the park, where each advisory split up into smaller groups and then rejoined to run around the zoo, interpreting clues to figure out which animals to take pictures with to later show Mr. Baer. It was fun and challenging, and my advisory did fairly well, but it didn’t really accomplish much other than me burning off a few calories running around frantically to find an animal that fit the really difficult clues. And when I say difficult, I mean difficult. The people that worked at the zoo for years couldn’t figure out what animal the clues were talking about. Much like the PSATs, you start to get nervous when you see more and more advisories finishing before you and realizing your time is running out. When you finally finished, you took your camera with at least a dozen pictures back to show Mr. Baer, which he then checked to make sure were correct. Every advisory had several wrong answers, again like the long test we had just taken. Overall, the day was filled with a lot of strategy, timing, planning, stress, and racing to finish. It would have been much appreciated if we could have gone home after the PSAT, skipping the sweat and the pressure of competition. The sophomores had their first experience with the PSAT and I’m sure would have liked to go home as well. So really, instead of the shot heard around the world, was the sound heard around the world of sophomores and juniors complaining about staying at school rather than being allowed to go home. Maybe that’s an exaggeration, but still, please, just let us goes home.]]>