It’s Monday, first period, and you’ve been blessed with a short 45-minute prep. Some might use it to study or caffeinate (obviously with Celsius). Not you. You’re headed straight to the beach. Yes, getting to Half Moon Bay is literal torture, but don’t let that discourage you. With proper planning, you can hit the surf, wax your board and catch exactly one wave before sprinting back to campus dripping saltwater onto your Analysis homework. Take Assistant Principal Harvey Newland as inspiration — he managed to surf before school almost daily (granted, his school was by the beach). Pro tip: Wear your wetsuit under your clothes to save time, although you may receive odd looks in class when you squeak against the chair. Bonus: the salt in your hair doubles as hair gel. Drawback: the scent of “eau de kelp” lingers through the rest of your classes. Still, nothing screams “I maximized my prep period” quite like returning from Half Moon Bay with sand in your shoes and a spiritual connection to Poseidon. Surf’s up, grades down, but vibes eternal.
Ah, a 3 or 4 period prep — the most inconvenient prep on a Monday. Don’t be a Debbie Downer, though: It’s the perfect time to confront that 200-page chunk of “A Tale of Two Cities” you swore you’d read over the weekend but instead replaced with TikTok scrolling. With only 45 minutes, you must evolve into a literary superhero: an incredible speed-reader. Step one: Stack your books (“Of Mice and Men,” “Great Gatsby,” “Romeo and Juliet”) in descending order of guilt. Step two: Master the art of diagonal reading, where you scan words like “alienation,” or “tragedy” and hope that’s enough for your reading quiz. Step three: Strategically dog-ear pages you’ll later quote to seem like a peak intellectual in class. Example: “I found Steinbeck’s use of foreshadowing here fascinating” (even though you only read half a sentence). The clock ticks louder with each passing minute, a reminder that Charles Dickens is either laughing at you from his grave or rolling around in it. By lunch, you’ve highlighted enough random lines to pass as insightful. Sure, you won’t actually know what happened in Chapter 23, but you will know how to fake it till you make it.
By late Monday, everybody is slogging through biology labs. But not you. You have a short prep and a bold plan: become a cemetery tourist. Alta Mesa Cemetery, conveniently close by, houses the resting places of both Steve Jobs and Shirley Temple. This means your 45 minutes of freedom can be both educational and weirdly inspirational. The trick is timing — Google Maps says it’s a six-minute walk, which leaves you with roughly 33 minutes for grave-hunting and six minutes to rush back, out of breath but spiritually enriched. If you manage to find Jobs’ gravestone, you can meditate on innovation: “What would Steve do? Probably invent an iGrave with a sleeker design.” At Shirley Temple’s site, practice your tap dance moves in tribute (though cemetery staff might not appreciate it). Don’t forget to snap a selfie as proof, because no one will believe that you actually spent your prep period hanging out with history in the flesh. Or, if anyone asks where you’ve been, just smile mysteriously and say, “networking.” After all, nothing honors a prep period more than a little morbidity mixed with celebrity sightseeing.
