Summer comes fast, the sun gleams yellow, bright and free with the joys of being out of school after dreading the day we can have our promised freedom. As teenagers, we expect our summers to be super eventful, by either hanging out with friends and family or away at camp. But this summer there has been a big difference between students’ summers. Glen Rock High School is filled with students who were either busy traveling the world or staying at home watching TV and sleeping all day.
Emerson Diamond, a sophomore at Glen Rock High School spent a few weeks of her summer in Hawaii. “This summer I went on a Teen Tour in Hawaii. I spent my summer making new friends and exploring the different islands in this beautiful state. Not only did I create new memories, but now I have found something that I would love to do next summer.” In addition, a junior at Glen Rock High School claimed to have gone to Paris, Wisconsin, Lake George and LBI this past summer, rating their summer a 10 out of 10. However, many students had completely different summer experiences.
Not only were students traveling to new places, they also have the same traditions they do every summer. A Glen Rock High School Junior has a summer tradition of going to LBI every year for the fourth of July. Not only do summer traditions create important memories, but they bring families and friends together and remind us of what’s truly important.
Despite wanting to spend our summers having fun and making new memories, that opportunity gets taken over by academics and sports. School work has become a huge part of everyone’s daily lives, even in the summer, data from Glen Rock High School shows that 15.6% of students surveyed spent the majority of summer doing school work while 6.3% had no school work at all. The remaining 78% had spent a decent amount of time over the summer doing schoolwork. While academics are a huge part of our summers, so are sports.
“I played a lot of tennis over the summer and prepped for preseason that started in late August. Because I was mostly focusing on tennis, it was hard to spend time with friends or go on any trips,” Chloe Jang, a sophomore student athlete shared.
Not only are academics and sports taking over our long awaited summers, teenagers are always seeking a chance to earn money. While balancing the summer load, 50% of students at Glen Rock High School also had a job this summer. “I worked at two camps, one was an internship teaching kids English in Italy, and one was a local camp in Glen Rock that is run by the community school,” a Junior at Glen Rock High School expressed.
As summer comes to an end, Glen Rock High School students are back to learning. We say goodbye to the summer fun and look forward to what the 2023-2024 school year has to offer. The tans will fade and the shorts will go back to the bottom of dresser drawers, but the memories will last forever.
