Annie is not ready to see the bomb explode. She has been skirting around the battlefield that others call “grade twelve” for the past year, and now, her fighting is about to pay off. She bites her tongue and hesitates to point the gun once she sees the flashing number “one” on the screen. She was not ready for this war, but she has to fight, or else her peers would consider her a fallen comrade. All of the science lessons, the math tests, and the late-night study sessions have paved a path to this moment. So, with a deep breath in and the push of a trigger— Annie is one of the many students in Ontario who are anticipating university admissions letters. Every year, thousands of unprepared high school seniors, like Annie, are jolted out of their comfortable childhoods as they are suddenly enlisted into the adult army. Many of those high school seniors, like Annie, are not prepared to risk their lives in a war. A mandatory grade thirteen would breed a greater variety of well-adjusted young adults. In Ontario, success during Grade twelve is necessarily if a student wants to go to university. Aside from collecting prerequisites for grade twelve courses, none of the other grades in high school matter to most Ontario universities; so, grade twelve is often worshipped as the meat of one’s high school experience. However, placing too much importance on a single year only stresses teenagers out. Ontario students only have to achieve high grade twelve marks to enter a majority of Ontario university courses. If a student achieves an average in the 90s in grade eleven yet suffers from an accident during grade twelve that greatly lowers his marks, universities will shrug the student off anyways. Even if the student has an excellent character, a low average in grade twelve spells out doom. Unlike American universities, most Ontario universities do not admit students based on essays or interviews, only grade twelve marks. Some may argue that teens with low averages will be likely to stay back and take a victory lap even if there is no mandatory grade thirteen, but that is not usually the case. Rather, these students may simply pick college or university courses that are not their first choices because they do not want to be left behind by their peers. There is a common stigma that students who do not leave high school after grade twelve are “childish” or “too stupid for university”. From personal experience, my neighbor was bullied for choosing to stay in high school for an extra year. He wanted to use that year to earn some extra money and bump up his math grades so that he could be admitted into the business school of his choice. However, he was still the target of ridicule from his younger peers because they thought he was “dumb” for retaking Calculus. With grade thirteen, students would automatically get a second chance to succeed, and university admissions officers will not assume that all students can only succeed in a single year. The bomb explodes and Annie scrambles away from the destruction. No. Annie’s life comes crashing down on her in the form of debris, trapping her body underneath heaps of rubble. She shrieks in broken pain. Why? She maintains a 90 average, all while juggling a job, volunteer hours, sports, clubs, and time with friends and family. She passed all the prerequisites; however, she was
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In the dark, she blindly wiggles her free arm in an attempt to find an opening. She hears the confused shouting of her comrades. They must have also been caught off guard by the explosion, but the familiar voices give Annie hope. Suddenly, light pours into Annie’s eyes and she blinks in surprise. All she sees above is the endless blue sky. So many possibilities await her now that she has survived. Still, despite some of her peers avoiding the explosion entirely, while others lie wounded, they all share the same look on their faces: utter confusion. None of them had prepared for this moment. Violence was not the best way to approach this shared enemy. If only they had learned how to defuse a bomb in Advanced
In the dark, she blindly wiggles her free arm in an attempt to find an opening. She hears the confused shouting of her comrades. They must have also been caught off guard by the explosion, but the familiar voices give Annie hope. Suddenly, light pours into Annie’s eyes and she blinks in surprise. All she sees above is the endless blue sky. So many possibilities await her now that she has survived. Still, despite some of her peers avoiding the explosion entirely, while others lie wounded, they all share the same look on their faces: utter confusion. None of them had prepared for this moment. Violence was not the best way to approach this shared enemy. If only they had learned how to defuse a bomb in Advanced