In high school, you’re given a locker to keep all your things in. The locker contains the essentials for life at school; books, folders, backpacks, spare pairs of gym shoes, crumpled pieces of paper, and now, big purses during the school day. I have to stop there between each class. Your basic locker is the most common symbol of high school, other than perhaps a migraine.

The things I keep in my locker are the essentials of curriculum.

But what I always find perplexing are the things I don’t care about crammed in my locker. I always have textbooks I was given at the beginning of the school year that I never actually use just sitting at the bottom. It’s similar to the way that teachers give so, so much work and are always giving away extra reading, but rarely give us enough time to actually use and apply them. So I’ll try, and I’ll try, but I never have enough time or space to get everything done.