Editorial: Final Week, Final Issue
The publication date of this issue falls on the last Thursday of classes in the school year. As spring term draws to a close, and as our staff at The Exonian put away the work for our final regular issue, we find it worthwhile to look back on the time well spent and reflect.
This year has been another reminder of an Exeter phenomenon—the weeks are slow but the months go by quickly. There’s something peculiar that happens at Exeter. As students slug through the day-by-day of papers and tests and required appointments, life here seems one continuous uphill struggle—a monotonous struggle. If anything, with our five-minute passing periods doubled this spring, and most classes taking hour-long blocks, the days are harder to get through.
Yet, by the time the end of a term swings around, and certainly the end of another school year, we look behind us and wonder where all the time went. We tend to miss the forest for the trees, and by the time we’ve ducked under all the branches and cut through all the bramble, we don’t quite realize we’ve already exited the forest. It is at once a paradox and a truism.
We’ve also been reminded that the best way to become good at something is often to be forced to do it. Few of us know from the outset those areas we excel in, and we tend to overestimate how difficult it might be to get something done. Trite though it will sound, it is only during the process itself that we realize what we could have done all along.
Our own staff at The Exonian has been acutely aware of it since winter term, once the new board turned over and our three-term tenure officially began. Most of us had only ever seen the publication process from the bottom up, and the prospect of managing it ourselves—a whole host of writers, editors, layout team, not to mention the business and web boards beyond the editorial staff—was certainly daunting. But we had to do it, so we did. We were hardly special in all of this—Exonians tend to produce at least half-decent work under pressure.
Beyond recurring themes, of course, this year has been uniquely significant in its own right as well. The graduating class is the last group of seniors who started prep year in plastic cubicles and their progeny. They adjusted admirably, bridging the Covid era and our gradual return to normalcy. As the Academy just now starts to forget the days of spit tests and quarantine zones, we thank the seniors for leading us through it.
It is also worth considering that, if we had a nickel for every cosmic event that fascinated the Exeter community this spring, we would have two nickels—not too much money, but it’s interesting that we had two in the span of a few weeks. Perhaps the eclipse, and later the aurora borealis, were both a sign from the universe that this year had something special going for it.
And, as they say, that’s a wrap. The staff at The Exonian are grateful for our readership and our unique position to serve the wider Exeter community. To our seniors, we’ll have the last word in our graduation issue—to everyone else, we wish you a thoroughly enjoyable and (dare we say it?) reasonably productive summer break.
