Dear Mr. Steele and Mr. Karpel,

I hope both you and your families both safe and doing well in these times. The Senior Class would like to thank you for a fantastic year of education and growth. We truly appreciate it. Although this is a stretch, we would like to ask you two to kindly reconsider cancelling the upcoming research paper. While we received an extension to work on it over spring break, seniors as a grade have had a lot on our plate in the past month. One big concern we’ve all had were our college decisions, which took up a lot more time than normal this year. Because we can’t physically tour campuses, students have had to attend copious amounts of Zoom college meetings, on top of also having to figure out their financials and which school they’re going to be able to attend (one which they may have never even set foot on campus). On top of this added stress, adjusting to our new schedule and workflow during this pandemic proved to be difficult and gave everyone a much harder time stay on track and engaged with their work. At this point, we have a considerable amount of students saying that they plan on either submitting nothing or submitting a 70% or below effort. That feels like a lose-lose situation, as you will have to read and then grade a bunch of half-assed essays, and students will spend their time writing the simplest, lowest common denominator paper they can, not really learning anything about writing a research paper in the process. We understand that we have had a lot of time on our hands but with the senior year winding down like this, it has been extremely hard to sit down and do any kind of work so extensively.

Regardless of your decision, we wanted to thank you for a fantastic year!

Best,
Class of 2020 H English