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aro-ace-advice · 4 years

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I've just started high school and I have gotten lots of homework and having lots of tests to study for. Any tips on how to study, manage time or even just handle lots of stress?

ree says: hi anon! as you may know if you’re a long-time follower, i dropped out of high school after one semester to study for my GED independently. my high school experience (however short) was enough to send me into a severe depressive episode, so most of my advice is probably going to be focused on mental health and not so much on things like grades, but i’ll try to include advice for both.

make friends in every class. even if they’re just casual friends, and you don’t become ride-or-die with them, having someone you can ask for homework help in every class will make things a good deal more tolerable.

do your most important homework as soon as you get home. give yourself like 20-30 minutes after you walk in the door to unwind and to eat a snack, and then get started. i always prioritized the subject that i knew would take the longest just to get it out of the way (fuckin algebra). do your daily homework immediately, and spread out your work for the assignments that have a deadline that’s further away. that way when you’re relaxing for the night you can actually enjoy your down time without any too-close deadlines.

don’t study too hard. i’m serious with this one. i know it probably sounds a little silly, since school is all about studying, right? nope. no. absolutely not. i knew kids who would study for hours and hours at a time, and like-- okay that’s fine if you like that sort of thing, but if your studying is constantly taking priority over having fun? stop that! there’s this awful mentality in high school sometimes where you think you don’t deserve to have fun if your studying isn’t done, or if you got a bad grade, and that’s so unhealthy. sometimes you need to let go and do something you enjoy for a little while regardless of your grades or how much work you have left to do. if studying and grades are really important to you and that’s simply not an option, turn your studying into something fun, like a game. i know that’s elementary school advice, but it works! humans have been using music and fun to teach concepts for years, and frankly i don’t understand why schools don’t use that strategy more often. think about nursery rhymes, or theater songs you heard like one time but somehow know all the lyrics to anyway. turn your language vocab into a little song, or your flashcards into one of those memory games. make your math formulas into slam poetry. poring for hours over your textbook will only do so much. it’s important to read them (especially the footnotes), but as long as you’re making sure that you’re reading comprehensively, going over the unit like once or twice every three weeks or so to keep your memory fresh should suffice.

eat a sustainable amount of food. you’d think i wouldn’t have to mention this, but i’ve known quite a few people (myself included) who will forego food when they’re stressed / depressed / anxious et cetera. sometimes i get so caught up in my work that i forget that i’m hungry, and then i get hangry and yell a lot, and then everybody has a bad time. that isn’t healthy! don’t get into that habit. don’t skip lunch or dinner to study, and eat snacks when you need a boost. your body needs nutrients and learning takes brain energy. take care of your body!

don’t take on a busier schedule than you can handle. you will see kids doing like four AP classes on top of five extracurriculars and still getting good grades. if that’s you, great! if that’s not you, also great! don’t think that just because someone you know can or wants to do all that that you have to do it too. stress levels and class loads do not need to be a competition, and surprisingly, some kids will treat them like they are. if you’re not an AP student, that’s totally fucking okay, got it? if you don’t work and go to school, it’s fine. your worth is not measured by the amount of things you can cram into a week. keep it to the things you actually want to do, and keep it all at a healthy and manageable level. if you decide to do AP classes, you might have to give up something else in your schedule so you don’t overwork yourself. rest and down time is a must.

school is not, and never will be, more important than your health. i got so miserable in school that i stopped caring that i was depressed, and just sort of went with it. that was bad. i could have gotten even more depressed than i did, but i decided enough was enough and that i needed to find a different way to graduate. high school is not built for everyone, it’s a cookie cutter system. don’t feel bad if your grades slip or you’re not doing so well. not every studying tip you hear from your peers or your teachers is going to work for you, and that’s kind of the problem with high school. your administration will say “this is the way to go about things, if you do it any other way, you’re wrong” with just about everything. study techniques. homework. english class. that rhetoric is gonna be so common, and it’s gonna feel really confining. if my list of advice doesn’t work for you, that’s okay! this is just some of the stuff that kept me sane while i was in school, and obviously, you are not me. you might feel differently about some of this stuff. so branch out. there’s never just one way of doing things, and if you’re not content with the way your high school experience is going, keep changing stuff up till you find what works. high school is only four years of your life, even if it feels like it takes forever, and you’re gonna graduate and see that the world really is not at all what school makes it seem like.

the most important thing to learn, more than any academia, is how to be kind and find enjoyment in everyday moments.

#anonymous #gen #school advice

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couldnt-think-of-a-funny-name · 7 years

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I need the story of the Underground Shakespearian Ring

Okay, so the school I went to for 9th grade had this really bizarre grading setup that I still don’t understand- for some reason, instead of the teachers writing up and grading tests and exams and the like, all the work was sent to an unknown third party for them to grade??? It made no sense.

Now, for the most part, the school had decent teachers, and they would just teach the curriculum correctly and then you wouldn’t run into problems with the grading. My English teacher was not one of those teachers.

So like, she hated me pretty early on- she was my homeroom teacher and thought it was disrespectful that I slept in homeroom in the mornings (I was on sleeping pills and they never wore off completely until around 10am), I never had the vocab homework in on time (someone kept breaking into my locker and stealing my vocab books I had to buy a new one like five times), she thought it was “inherently pessimistic and stuck up” when she caught me reading a book called ‘Ninth Grade Slays’ (it was about vampires, not her?), and during our Greek Mythology unit I kept correcting her about the name pronunciations of the gods (she pronounced Hephaestus as Hepatitis one time holy shit).

Anyway, her feelings on me aside, her teaching skills were shoddy at best. But I had had way worse teachers, so had the rest of the class, and Greek myths are pretty straight-up in what’s going on, so no one really had trouble with the third-party tests.

Then we get to the Romeo and Juliet unit.

Now, fun fact: Shakespeare has always come pretty easily to me. Like, to the point where I sometimes forget/fail to understand that other people have an incredibly hard time translating his works. (I told this whole story to my friends in the school I went to for 10th/11th/12th grade and when the drama department put on ‘Midsummers Night Dream’ one year, more than half the cast tried to get me to translate their scripts and monologues for them lmao).

So, anyway, I’m just a girl, reading Romeo and Juliet and digging how it’s going…and then the teacher starts ‘translating’ it.

Um.

I cannot sift through all the bullshit this woman was spewing, but let’s just say that my favorite part is during Romeo’s spew about Rosaline, there’s one part where he says something like ‘with cupid’s arrow/she hath diane’s will’, and the teacher was taking this to mean Rosaline was a Super Lesbian who was breaking the law or something and running away with her lover Diane, which would be a rad storyline, sure, but like…I’m just raising my hand like “Um Ma’am, Diana is the Roman goddess of chastity. What Romeo meant is that she told him she’s sworn off love and is probably becoming a nun?” and this woman just got. So angry. Like, excuse me, you are a student, you’re here to learn, so you clearly don’t know anything about this (I read Romeo and Juliet for the first time in like preschool whoops). Anyway, she continues on making up her own plot to the play, and I…well I was basically Hermione Fucking Granger at this point I couldn’t just sit there and listen to someone be this wrong about something omfg??? She just got angrier and angrier and stopped calling on me after a while.

So for a couple lessons I’m just left to seethe quietly, but one day after class this girl I knew since grade school came up to me and was like “Could you…? Tell me what the hell we’re supposed to be learning?” and I didn’t even like her but I liked the validation of being someone’s Chosen Teacher so I wrote out a summary for her of everything we had covered so far so she could actually write a comprehendible essay for our homework that night.

But THEN the during the class when we got our essays back, she made a HUGE DEAL, like ‘oh Molly, it wasn’t bad enough that you’ve been failing this course material, now you have to drag your friends into it by trying to re-write the play?’ (l m a o). Like this bitch had literally tried to fight me on ‘Paris is the guy Juliet’s father wants her to marry’ and she didn’t even put a grade on my essay where I said the play only ended in tragedy because of how young and naïve the kids were, that if they had taken a breather and thought things through it probably would’ve been fine (it was a damn good essay and I stand by it). But anyway, she’s trying to make me out to my classmate’s as someone who’s trying to sabotage their education for laughs.

This backfired on her.

See, it dawned on people one by one, that she was only teaching the wrong material -> so they wouldn’t know the right material -> so when they eventually would take the exams they would only have her crazy answers -> which the third party graders wouldn’t know about -> everyone fails this course that’s like half the overall grade of the year.

Most students consider that a problem.

So suddenly the class has decided I’m the fucking Shakespeare Whisperer or something, and one by one start begging me for help. At first I was confused, because as I said, it’s so easy for me that I didn’t realize literally the entire class was lost out of their asses here. omfg. So I was really getting hassled here but I didn’t want my entire class to fail you know???? So I started meeting with people during study halls or texting them after school so they knew what was going on. And then they started telling people in this teacher’s other classes, including upperclassmen who were lost as fuck, so this was quickly spiraling out of control on my end, but overall people were really starting to understand the plays better!! So I was feeling really great.

But then, the teacher noticed that none of the homework getting handed in to her matched up with her crazy translations, and knew I was the sole person to blame (naturally). She literally tried to get me suspended over this, she went to the school’s disciplinarian!

Note: This guy, Mr. C, knew I was a God damn angel- my science class was off the charts, inappropriately awful, so every time one of our science teacher’s wanted to give the entire class detention, instead of calling Mr. C up to the class room as was the rule, they’d send me down to get him so he’d know to write up every student except for me. So when my English teacher dragged me in there he was looking her like “What on Earth could this girl have possibly done to piss you off?” 😂😂

And when she explained he looked at her for a very long moment, glanced at me with a signature ‘Office’ Reaction Face™ , turned back to her and was like “You want her suspended…for starting a study group?” and I was CHOKING.

So that really pissed her off and they started fighting and this was a very overworked and Done man so at some point he gave up and was like “I’m not suspending her but fine we can put a ban on the study group if you leave my office” omfg. So all the other students get notified and now they’re back to freaking out about the upcoming exams.

So like two days later, I’m at lunch, complaining about this to one of my friends who had a different English teacher and thus no problem, and I’m on this whole angry rant (Because I’m pissed, a bunch of kid’s grades are gonna get fucked up because of this! They just wanted to do well! I just wanted to help them!) and my friends staring at me quietly the whole time and when I finish I’m like “What?” and she’s just like “…Molly did you literally start up Dumbledore’s Army in our fucking school?” and I died on scene.

But then I started thinking about the comparison and I was like? You know fucking what? If Harry Potter can get those kids to pass their fucking DADA test I can help kids pass their fucking English Exam. Bring it the fuck on, Umbridge.

So I started Spreading The Word that anyone who needs help with their Shakespeare course can still get help, we just all need to meet up once to hash out the details. After some back and forth notes and deliberations, we ended up meeting in the school library, which was hilarious for a few reasons:

1) It was directly across the hall from this teacher’s classroom.

2) It was actually a converted janitors closet, way smaller than all the other classrooms, and there were like 50 people shoved in there; Not exactly an ideal Room of Requirement

3) The library carried no Shakespeare texts, but had the entire Harry Potter series on display to see when you first walked in

But anyway, despite the fact that we were literally three feet away from her door while we were doing this, our teacher was none the wiser of the meeting. We worked out a game plan- everyone writes out bullshit essays that align with what the teacher’s expecting. After she grades those and gives them back, they get them to me- slipping them in my locker, handing it to me discreetly in the halls or in another class, what have you. I then try to power through the dizzying amount of confusion radiating out of the teacher’s mouth and onto these papers, and more or less write out better translation of what was going on in whatever scene they covered, what the highlights they needed to know were, stuff like that, and then slip it back to them in similar discreet fashion (so the teacher/disciplinarian wouldn’t see me and get suspicious ; also because I was like 15 and wanted to feel like a super cool secret agent). They would then keep my copies and use them as study guides for the upcoming exams, where they would then answer all the questions correctly, the way the third party graders would mark correctly, and pass the exams + the bullshit essays would get them high marks in the teacher’s homework grades. The teacher never caught on to what was happening, just thought her students finally started paying attention to her.

All in all, it was a complicated mess, but it fucking worked. I don’t think anyone failed their exams that year. Will I ever be cooler? No. I think I fucking peaked when I was 15.

#True Story #shakespeare #lmao #I hope this is like...literate I'm pretty tired right now lol #asks #molly mumbles

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kurosakiiprincess · 4 years

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Rough Day

Happy Valentine’s Day!!!!!!! <3 <3

So, today was a full schedule for me. I had classes all day, plus my coordinator came to observe me today. The teacher asked for me to create a vocabulary word game, so that the students could practice spelling in English. I did not get a chance to finish it the day before, so I arrived to work early today and finished them. I had them all printed out and ready. I was so proud of myself! Right before I was going to laminate the cards, the teacher told me that they students could not spell or read most of those words. Keep in mind that these words were all vocabulary words that the students has previously studied in their textbook.

Before I had the chance to respond, another teacher came in and told me that someone was on the phone. It was the other English teacher, sending a reminder about my next class. I had totally lost track of time and only had 5 minutes left until my next class. So, I had to throw all of the vocab cards in a pile and rush up stairs. I got to class about 1 minute before the bell rang.

I had one break between classes, and used it to change some of the words. And with the help of the teacher, I was able to complete ONE section of the cards ( in 2 minutes). And we were 2 minutes late to class. Did I mention that THIS was the class my coordinator was observing? Things started off really well. But by the time the card game came around, the students could not read most of the words and the pictures were too hard for them. It was a bit of organized chaos. And i was so distracted trying to do some last minute changes to the cards, that I was not really active in the class. That class was pretty rough. And i felt terrible that I was not prepared for it. It did not help that the teacher kept complaining about how the cards were too hard. I apologized so many times to the teacher. I am usually so well prepared and active in class, so I felt like a bad teacher because I was distracted in class and my cards were not well prepared.

After class, I ended up spending some of my lunch time redoing and laminating the cards. And on top of that, I had to grade the speaking tests from my other classes. In the end, the other classes went A LOT better with the new cards. The teacher and I were both very pleased. Wow!!! I have not felt so much “stress” since I was a head teacher. Kudos to teachers everywhere.

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