The first semester of my sophomore year has been a much better experience than I would have guessed. I have gained many new skills and discovered more areas that could use some growth.
One thing that I have really gotten better at this year is advocating. Last year I really struggled with going to any of my teachers for help in their classes. This year I am taking advanced physics. This class covers many math concepts that I have never seen before. Multiple times this year I have had to go to Kurt to either ask if I can do corrections on an assignment and instructions on some of the concepts we have learned. My evidence for this is my pendulum and spring lab. The first time I turned this in I was missing many of the key concepts that were required for credit. When doing corrections for this I asked him to help explain each of the sections that I missed, so that I would not only complete the assignment I would also understand what I was missing. I never went to any teachers during my first semester last year and I have definitely noticed a difference in my academic performance when I advocate for help.
Another skill that I am celebrating is my perseverance. I only started bike racing last year and this year I have grown so much. I was finishing around 70th last year at every race I went to. This year I really started to train more and get a lot better. At my first race I finished around 60th. This just made me train harder and work for a better spot at my next race. I moved up around 5 spots, It was really at my next race where my training started to show. I moved up almost 20 spots and finished 30th. This put me in a great position to go to state champs. At states, I started around 70th and moved up 20 spots and pushed as hard as I could and finished right around 50th. At every race, I stuck with the person in front of me. At every practice, I did my best not to fall behind and stick with the group. I feel that doing all of this has helped me greatly achieve better results in school and biking.
One thing that I have worked on this year is being a better leader.I feel my leadership shows most in math 2. We do a lot of group work and write all of our answers on the whiteboard. This year I have been contributing to my table group by explaining my work to the best of my ability and delegating responsibilities in the group, such as having someone write the groups answers on the whiteboard. This skill will be very helpful when being a bike coach as well because the younger groups of kids need to be able to trust their coach. It also makes it easier when they listen to you. I will continue to be a leader in math, other group work, and projects.
Something that I continue to struggle with is my time management. In most of my classes I will do the work if it interests me. But other times when I know I can do it when I get home I will usually just listen to music and do something else. This makes it a lot harder to have free time after school. An example of this is my the Socratic Seminar pre-write for “The Things They Carry”. I just listened to music and did some online shopping. Not using my class time effectively was apparent when looking at my grade on this assignment. I don’t know how I can fix this, It is an ongoing problem for me. I have tried multiple things like keeping a planner and putting notifications on my phone.
Another thing I struggle with is procrastination and getting work in on time. I feel that these two are very similar because the procrastination leads to late work. If you look at my grades you will see that there are a lot of assignments that are late. It's usually homework that is late. I will go home and keep telling myself that I will do it and it will not be late. As I have discovered this hardly ever works. The late work affects my grade and I know that having late assignments will not work in college. I have progressively gotten better about turning my assignments in on time throughout the year and I hope that I will only keep improving.
Question: How will I be able to continue turning in all my work and keeping my grades up all through the next semester?
One thing that I have really gotten better at this year is advocating. Last year I really struggled with going to any of my teachers for help in their classes. This year I am taking advanced physics. This class covers many math concepts that I have never seen before. Multiple times this year I have had to go to Kurt to either ask if I can do corrections on an assignment and instructions on some of the concepts we have learned. My evidence for this is my pendulum and spring lab. The first time I turned this in I was missing many of the key concepts that were required for credit. When doing corrections for this I asked him to help explain each of the sections that I missed, so that I would not only complete the assignment I would also understand what I was missing. I never went to any teachers during my first semester last year and I have definitely noticed a difference in my academic performance when I advocate for help.
Another skill that I am celebrating is my perseverance. I only started bike racing last year and this year I have grown so much. I was finishing around 70th last year at every race I went to. This year I really started to train more and get a lot better. At my first race I finished around 60th. This just made me train harder and work for a better spot at my next race. I moved up around 5 spots, It was really at my next race where my training started to show. I moved up almost 20 spots and finished 30th. This put me in a great position to go to state champs. At states, I started around 70th and moved up 20 spots and pushed as hard as I could and finished right around 50th. At every race, I stuck with the person in front of me. At every practice, I did my best not to fall behind and stick with the group. I feel that doing all of this has helped me greatly achieve better results in school and biking.
One thing that I have worked on this year is being a better leader.I feel my leadership shows most in math 2. We do a lot of group work and write all of our answers on the whiteboard. This year I have been contributing to my table group by explaining my work to the best of my ability and delegating responsibilities in the group, such as having someone write the groups answers on the whiteboard. This skill will be very helpful when being a bike coach as well because the younger groups of kids need to be able to trust their coach. It also makes it easier when they listen to you. I will continue to be a leader in math, other group work, and projects.
Something that I continue to struggle with is my time management. In most of my classes I will do the work if it interests me. But other times when I know I can do it when I get home I will usually just listen to music and do something else. This makes it a lot harder to have free time after school. An example of this is my the Socratic Seminar pre-write for “The Things They Carry”. I just listened to music and did some online shopping. Not using my class time effectively was apparent when looking at my grade on this assignment. I don’t know how I can fix this, It is an ongoing problem for me. I have tried multiple things like keeping a planner and putting notifications on my phone.
Another thing I struggle with is procrastination and getting work in on time. I feel that these two are very similar because the procrastination leads to late work. If you look at my grades you will see that there are a lot of assignments that are late. It's usually homework that is late. I will go home and keep telling myself that I will do it and it will not be late. As I have discovered this hardly ever works. The late work affects my grade and I know that having late assignments will not work in college. I have progressively gotten better about turning my assignments in on time throughout the year and I hope that I will only keep improving.
Question: How will I be able to continue turning in all my work and keeping my grades up all through the next semester?