Hi my name is Maddie McDonald and today I will be talking about how I’ve been able to better my academic self.
It’s the quiz on Wednesday, the project due Thursday and then having to read 4 chapters for Friday. We’ve all been there, so much work you don’t even know where or how to start.
It’s not easy to handle all the assignments we get, and I can say with confidence that doing things in a timely or efficient manner has never been my strong suit. Just managing school work in general was something that took me a while to get the hang of.
I don’t know if anyone has ever heard of math connections so let me elaborate. It’s kind of exactly what it sounds like, an extra class where about six other students and I would be retaught what we learned in math that day at a much, much slower pace. I was in the class for five years from middle school to high school.
I’m not even in the class anymore and my friends from home still bring up the fact that I was a math connections kid. It wasn’t just my friends being difficult though, sometimes along the way even the teachers were discouraging, making it even harder to try to stay on top of things.
I specifically remember this one teacher Ms Barrett who seemed to always go out of her way to make me feel bad about my work. Aside from her just genuinely being hard to contact or talk to, she once called me up to her desk and compared me to one of the best students in the class. She called my handwriting bad, said my work was incorrect and then proceeded to tell me how I should be more like the other girl. This was years ago and I have never nor will ever forget it.
Anyways, having difficult teachers is a common thing for students throughout their life and this can send kids down the wrong learning path. Discouraging students to ask for help or work harder at the stuff they don’t understand when this is supposed to be what teachers encourage them to do.
However, even though my math skills still might not be the greatest, my efforts, and teachers, have improved. From freshman year of highschool to senior year, I was able to improve my GPA pretty decently. I’m not bringing this up as an excuse to brag, it wasn’t high enough to brag about, but I’m bringing it up to show that I really have been able to figure out a routine that works for me and because of that I have been rewarded with a somewhat positive outcome.
Ways that personally have worked for me are keeping a planner, writing things down, looking at examples and also working with headphones in. I like to think that it helps drown out the distractions.
For some people though, working with headphones could be their worst nightmare and doing homework in silence is the only way they can get things done. It’s about figuring out what works best for you.
There are a lot of different approaches students can take when looking to improve and it’s a lot easier to list out the ways than to actually do it but believe me it is possible. It can seriously start with something as simple as staying after class to ask a question, or designating an hour of time in the day to strictly work on schoolwork.
I am here as living proof to tell you that adding even just a little bit of routine into your day or week can end up making such a big difference.
