Three days after Baltimore County Public Schools relinquished students to the freshly-fallen purgatory of precipitation, my family decided to go sledding. I don’t know if it was nostalgia for the winters we spent in Germany when I was a child or mere boredom that prompted the journey, but I found myself sandwiched between sleds in the backseat of our Honda on a Saturday afternoon, anticipating the unmistakable thrill of frictionless gravity. The magic hit as soon as we exited the car. Suddenly my parents and I were a trio of schoolchildren ascending a frosty mountain. My father, considering …

People talk about senioritis, but my experience has been more like semipermanent jet lag. On the first day of my senior year, I was in transit from Tokyo to Baltimore. By the time I made it to my first period college algebra class, it had been Sunday for 37 hours; the first few hours of Monday never registered. Math was even more somnambulatory a subject than usual. Although mine was not a typical high school scenario, after talking to some groggy-looking classmates, the sentiment seemed unanimous enough. I was back in America, but it felt like I had never left, and seeing three blackboards …