VOL. XV, NO. 10

While getting up in the morning becomes more of a needless grind and your life is beginning to take on a less exciting flair, school still lingers on; but lying in the back of your mind is that haunting feeling that awaits its bi-monthly appearance. When it leaps out at you, you know it has come. It's that in middle-of-the-road time known as the week of the progress report.

"What are progress reports?" you unknowingly and stupidly ask in your freshman year. Well, for one thing, teachers look upon the progress reports as a means of communicating the student's lack of intellectual growth, in the subject he is partaking in, with his parent or guardian. However, for the student, progress reports mean getting yelled at by your parents, no television for five weeks, loss of the car for two years, loss of early dismissal, and other various Maine West privileges.

You can beat a progress report if you know how. One way to do this is run home right after your last class and get it out of the mail before your mother finds it. This may result in pleurisy of the lung, considering the fact you have wet hair from swimming in gym class and that you live five miles away from school. A more nervy way of beating the system is telling the teacher you need to consult the teacher's answer edition for the corrections on a previous assignment and casually remove it and its two carbon copied brothers from the pile of other failure notices on the teacher's desk. Of course, you can take the violent way out by beating g up the mailman as he is about to insert the devious ''tale-teller'' in the mailbox.

"What good are progress reports?" you ask. Well, besides cluttering up the federal mail and getting you into trouble, progress reports are honestly no good at all. They simply repeat the same cliches about your lack of progress that you've heard a million times before. So we bid so long to the humble progress report, until next month.