Spirit Week With or Without the Spirit

Spirit Week is an interesting concept, to say the least. As it’s name suggests, it is supposed to be about school spirit, in our particular case Palmer Pride. But in the end, Spirit Week generally winds up devoid of Spirit. Rarely is anything actually about school spirit. By no means am I blaming this on anyone, nor am I saying that our school is the only school at which this “Spirit Week without the Spirit” occurs; I am simply saying that the Spirit isn’t there, which results in activities which are generally uninteresting to many people. Now at this point in my discussion, many student council members might take offense. They might say something similar to: “Excuse me, but I put my time and effort into planning and running Spirit Weeks, do you realize how disheartening and hurtful what you are saying is?” To which I would have to reply: “Yes, I understand. At the last school I attended, though we had no student council, we still ran Spirit Weeks. The teachers handpicked students, like myself, from their classes to be the student leaders. I ran numerous Spirit Weeks at that school, each with varying degrees of failure.” Welcome to the twenty-first century people. The world sits at our fingertips with our technology and our made ready to use products, whether they are frozen pizzas or toy trains. We never have to get off our seats for anything; we never have to work to do things for ourselves. Our teenagers are a group of lazy, passive, stereotypical robots. Occasionally one student comes along who is bright, passionate, an outside-of-the-box type person. Someone who is very one-point-O. These people are different; these people have Spirit. These are the students that bother with things like Spirit week. They know that years from now the grades you got won’t matter to you anymore, instead you will look back and say: “Remember that time that I dressed up like a Christmas Tree in high-school? Those days were the best.” So what are we doing waiting on our couches for the world to come to us? Spirit Week is a principle we can apply to real life; we have to be active, spirited participators in our world: we can’t just watch life as though it is a movie! Good things may come to those who wait, but great things come to those who take a step out of the comfort zone and reach for them.