Spirit Week at East can be described in one word: stressful. There’s always that one guy that forgets the moves to “Magic”, while the girl on your left pesters you teach her the moves to Shiny Teeth and Me. Then there are the choreographers yelling over the music while Hannah Sclarsky’s standing on a lunch table blowing her whistle–basically the whole thing is a mess.

I went into Spirit Week this year really dreading dance practice, and I’ll admit to skipping the first couple, but once I came around I was really surprised at how well organized our class was. It seems that after our first three years at struggling to remain calm during practices we finally learned to cooperate and it really showed during the dance competition in our spirit and our numbers. Our dance couldn’t have worked out any better; from the Joffes and the drum line to our glow-in-the-dark finale, everything went perfectly.

No matter how much we hated going to dance practice I’m sure we’ll all miss it next year. Even though we were not able to get everyone in our grade to make a giant 2012 as Mr. Hulme always wanted, we still had an amazing end product that we could all be proud of. Not only was it an amazing and memorable experience but we also learned the amount of hard work and effort it takes to achieve a goal, especially within a large group. Looking back, the past four Spirit Weeks were all worth the stress and screaming because we always had a great time dancing with our classmates, making new friendships, and creating lasting memories.