School Years Like Dog Years

To start my blogging journey, for lack of a better term, I'm going to first hit the topic that brought me to this site... college. Actually, I'm just going to use this as my segway to what I'm really trying to get across: we spend too much time in high school, and it's affecting us, or maybe just me, adversely.
I am going to be starting classes at U of I this fall, and frankly, I can't afford it. I'm part of that majority group of kids who are stuck between a rock and a hard place because I'm not eligible for financial aid, but I cannot afford to go to school depending on my own resources. So I hunt for scholarships to help me. But herein lies the problem: I don't qualify for most scholarships either. My parents are not alumni of the school I will be attending, I do not associate myself with any particular religion, I am not a mason, part of a union or the Elks Club, and the scholarships I've seen are altogether too specific. Most require an essay detailing how you've changed your community for the better, but besides from my own personal experiences that I consider amazing, unforgettable, and life-altering, and certain people or events I might have delt a hand to, I wouldn't by any means give myself credit for having shaped my community in any way at all, not even negatively. So like most kids my age going to college this year, I am taking out a ridiculous amount of loans, and to make it worse, in my parents name, so I will not only owe the bank money through my parents, but I will also owe my parents my success. They trust me enough and support me enough to risk losing hundreds of thousands of dollars so I can get a world-class education, and for that I will FOREVER be indebted to them. Maybe it's just me, but I'm thinking I've got alot on my shoulders, and it doesn't even end there. For the longest time I thought that as soon as my pencil hit the desk once I was done taking the ACTs, that my life would be worry-free for at least a year to come.
Senior year was supposed to be a blow-off year. But when I saw my schedule full of Advanced Placement classes, my heart sunk. I was going to have to pass all these classes like AP Macroeconomics, AP French, and Advanced Physics, hold down a job, AND go nuts applying for college. I have senioritis so bad it actually hurts. Every morning I wake up I curse the day ahead of me. I ask myself "Why am I still in high school? What am I really learning anymore? I've already learned all this stuff before! @*#%$!" I kid you not, in ALL of my classes, all they do is reiterate the SAME material we've spent the past 3 years of high school learning. For example, in my AP French 5 class, this year, we've gone over ALL THE EXACT SAME tenses and ALL THE EXACT SAME vocabulary that we've already known. Except this time they make it SOUND more complicated when it's really the same thing. In fact, it only confuses me!.
I'm 18 about to graduate from my 12th year of school. By the time my parents were 17, they were both already in college. Thats because they did not grow up in the United States, and where they are from schooling ends after the 10th grade. They started school at 6 or 7 years old, so thats why they were already 17 when they finished 10th grade and went on to college. This makes so much more sense to me. Why not cut down on years of schooling so that kids like me can have an extra year to either work to save up for college, or ALREADY BE IN college? Then maybe kids will be more mature at a younger age, because they'll know that they are that much closer to adulthood.
Thats why I say school years are like dog years: its only been a couple of years, but before you know it, you find yourself feeling like a tired old dog. As the saying goes " You can't teach an old dog new tricks," and maybe that true, at least for me, because I haven't learned any new tricks this year, just wasted some time. Maybe one less year would be helpful.