Everyone goes through hard times in life, and especially school, however, there is something special about using your own ideas and motivation to bring yourself out of slumps in order to succeed to the best of your ability. I am no exception to this. I have had my struggles and obstacles in high school, but through hard work and creative thinking, I was able to figure out some things that helped my GPA, and also, some things that didn’t work.
My freshman year of high school was the “distance learning” year. All of my classes were on zoom and I had a hard time focusing with the situation at hand. I have always been a straight A student, but there were times during distance learning that I had a couple B’s because of my lack of focus and engagement. To try to fix the problem, I scheduled FaceTime calls with some of my classmates to discuss what we did wrong on big tests to discover what we could do to fix them. However, during this time, most of my peers were unengaged aswell, so they didn’t have much to offer at the time. I continued to get B’s and C’s on my tests and my class grade in my history class was still a B, so it was established that the FaceTime calls were not the right solution for me. It is always great to ask for help, but it doesn’t work all the time. This was a good learning point for me because I learned that sometimes I don’t need external help, furthermore, I just need to fix my own mentality. In an effort to stay more engaged and raise my level of focus, I decided that maybe clearing my mind by going on bike rides during “break periods” would work. To my surprise, going out on bike rides for half an hour increased my level of focus and engagement during the zoom classes. This ended up proving itself in the gradebook. I started scoring A’s on my tests again, and my grades were all back up to A’s. A very similar story occurred in my sophomore year.
I was the only sophomore, and the only athlete there in my Calculus class. From the first day I felt that I did not fit in. My reaction to this situation was to tackle the challenge alone and make no effort to build relationships with my peers. This was a humbling experience and I was met with frustration and failure. I started going to tutoring and talked to my peers to get help when I didn’t score well on a test, and to my surprise not only did my teacher and my peers welcome me with open arms, but many of them felt just as out of place as I did and needed the same support. Things quickly turned around and my peers and I all began to excel. With the help of my new allies I was able to earn an A in the course and also pass the AP test with a 4. What felt even better was knowing that my peers became my friends and they all passed the course and many passed the AP test as well. This experience taught me that fitting in is a matter of effort and humility. And if you stay humble and put forth the effort you’ll find that you really aren’t so different after all.