I’m 10 years old, peering at a teenager from 1986 named Ferris Bueller. He’s jumping into a Ferrari, planning to take his girlfriend, Sloane, and best friend, Cameron, on a joyride around Chicago. I watch on, transfixed by the student who wasn’t in school.

It took 103 minutes for Principal Ed Rooney to realize that Ferris wasn’t late for macroeconomics, rather he was skipping school entirely. Sure, teachers think he’s the classic dropout — well on his way to a future of smoking cigarettes or flipping burgers at the local burger joint. Mr. and Mrs. Bueller understand that Ferris is at home, fighting off kidney disease or another illness that conveniently kept him out of British literature class. Ferris passed out at 31 Flavors ice cream shop last night, a freshman says, so he’s certainly not going to be back any time soon. Ferris is doing none of those things. It’s sunny outside. Ferris is going to seize the day. Being a self-righteous rule follower, my first reaction was simple: Get back to class.

Upper School students don’t appreciate Ferris’s approach. Instead of faking fevers to skip school and go to a baseball game or the tallest building in the city, we hide real fevers to make it to class.

Some of us cough through chemistry lectures while trying to write every word down, because we all know that it’s harder to miss school than to suffer through it. I’ve certainly learned that when you do miss a lecture, somehow you’ve been assigned a paper on molarity and molality, there’s a test next week, oh, and perfect, they did a lab with a full write-up. It’s better to stick it out.

But there’s something to be said about Ferris’s choices. He pushes himself just as much as we do, but by making his time count. And honestly, the best days I’ve had are the ones where I use the grit that this school taught me in a place that isn’t the classroom.

The Nantahala is eight miles of churning Class 3 rapids. For context, Niagara Falls is a Class 5, and people lose their teeth on Class 3s. I’m good in a kayak. I’d been sprinting slalom for a year and been running Class 2s the whole summer. I whisper, “You can do hard things,” before shoving and plummeting.

Two seconds later, my French braids press flat underneath my helmet as my skull collides with the rock I was supposed to veer around. The current whips me upside down fast and hard into silence and cold. I flash back to thrashing underwater, failing to resist the current’s force that pinned my hands at my sides and my neck arched backward.

Although I had never been stuck underwater, I’d been uncomfortable and on the edge of a freak-out more than a few times. So I go back to what we all do when we have these kinds of moments in school: problem, solution, now. Reach around blindly for my paddle. Find it and bend against the current so I go with it, not against it. Try to roll up. Nope. Running out of breath. The tab on my skirt that’ll rip me out of the kayak is my last option, and I take it.

I’ve learned a lot at the school, but the most valuable thing I will take away is determination. School isn’t the only place where you’ll need to push through. Studying until 2 a.m. isn’t always going to be the hardest challenge you’ll face. The good thing is that we’ve already practiced tenacity; we’ve already stepped up to the plate and are ready to seize the day.