How should I fill up my free time?

Pre-College Issues High School Life
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<p>So I recently quit Band, which frees up about 10 hours of my extracurricular weekly schedule, and now I don't know what I should do. I'm honestly really bad with free time - I try to do something productive, like study or learn Python or something, but I always get distracted and end up surfing the internet. So, uh, any organized intellectually enriching programs for me to do during the school year instead of internet surfing?</p>

<p>I'm currently a freshman, and I'm working on starting 3 clubs (Philosophy Club, Math Club, and Science Olympiad). I practice piano and flute. I have 4 hours a week at the Russian School of Mathematics. None of those have started yet (except flute), but they will within the next week or so. Also, I'm trying to get a volunteering job at a homeless shelter, but no one's calling me back about it. (I'm thinking I'll look for some tutoring jobs in the school.) I'm also trying to get a volunteer job at a science museum, but I'm waiting on my teacher to send my the letter of recommendation for that. It might get filled up fast, so that one's pretty iffy.</p>

<p>My academic interests are philosophy, math, and some branches of science. I'm bad at engineering, programming, most anything hands-on, and self-studying (I'm easily distracted). Some sort of tutoring-kind thing would be ideal, but I don't know what to get a tutor for and my dad thinks that tutors are only for really stupid people. </p>

<p>Currently my free time is composed of mostly surfing the internet. Generally, online shopping and watching TED talks.</p>

<p>TL;DR: I don't know how to not be lazy, help me force myself to do something.</p>

<p>PS. Off topic, but if you have any ideas for recruiting people into my clubs, that would be helpful. So far I've asked a ton of people to either join Math Club or help me find people to join Math Club, and all of them are either really busy or they give me this look like "Who gave you the idea that it's humanly possible to enjoy math?" I've got a few people for Philosophy Club, but generally, again, people are really busy, and they don't know enough about what Philosophy Club would be like to try to squeeze it into their schedule . . . my school is sports-obsessed, and I don't have the kind of popularity necessary to tear people away from their 3-hours-a-day track team. I'm putting up the posters for my clubs on Monday.</p>

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<p>Why don’t you play a sport?</p>

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<p>You could do something called ‘reading’. </p>

<p>Or something else called ‘relaxing’.</p>

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<p>Whoa, totally wasn’t ready for how active this board is.</p>

<p>@ SandwichGirl Well, I’m not super-athletic, but I ski when the season starts and I do this exercise video daily for about an hour and stuff. Not really gonna be picked for any varsity teams any time soon, though, and as it is my schedule is already too busy for any of the school teams. (I mean, that was why I quit Band, and band only meets for 4 hours every Wednesday and Saturday, and 1 hour every Friday. Teams meet, on average, 3 hours every single day. I have flute and piano lessons and stuff those days.) They’ve kind of finished registration for those, anyway.</p>

<p>@ ravenclaw: You say this as if I’m not already doing way too much relaxing, haha . . . but no, I’m serious, I really hate this whole relaxing thing, and I already did nothing but relax in middle school. I get so stressed out when I’m not doing something productive that’ll help me out later in life, but I can’t seem to stop doing it. I do read (cut that part out of my first post to make it a bit shorter), but I would prefer something more, I dunno, organized or group-setting-like.</p>

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<p>Not sure how much free time you’ll actually end up having if you stick to this</p>

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<p>Facebook or something of that sort maybe?</p>

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<p>get married, make baby | adopt one</p>

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<p>@jgraider: Possibly, but keep in mind that considering how busy everyone else is in school, I may have to make each club a once-a-month thing. Having club meetings once a month seems to be a norm here, anyway, if the French Club and Sci-Fi Club are of any indication. (I was a bit more used to the once-a-week schedule from middle school.)</p>

<p>Also, I don’t really use Facebook myself, but I’ve gotten a friend to change their status to something along the lines of “So there are these 3 new clubs, contact this person for more information”. No one’s contacted me about that, so that was kind of a failure. Now that you mention it, though, I have a better idea for how to get the whole Facebook thing rolling. Maybe this time, I’ll contact several of my friends about changing their status, and make their status something like “3 clubs, contact this email, if you’re interested, know someone who might be interested, or want to help, make this your status for a bit”. Maybe that’s a bit too chain-mail-spam-y, though, it might not go over well. I don’t really have enough friends who use Facebook, anyway.</p>

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<p>Become top poster on HSL</p>

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<p>So many walls of text dissuaded me from reading anything is this thread.</p>

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<p>I don’t even have free-time! LUCKY!!!Watch t.v.!</p>

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<ol>
<li><p>Get your school morning announcements people. For Philosophy club you can ask a thought-provoking question and then do a video feature every week where you randomly approach people with a video camera and ask that question (and their permission to air their answer). It seems kind of risky but at my school the announcements people do something like this, albeit with asking about vocabulary words.</p></li>
<li><p>Order pizza (or donuts). Announce it with posters. So many people will show up just for the food and leave, but while they’re they there you might as well force them to listen to you/take a flyer/make them do a ‘fun’ math problem for the pizza slice.</p></li>
<li><p>Might want to narrow down the 3 clubs you’re starting to 1 or 2 if you end up meeting every week; never mind this if they end up meeting once a month.
For free time, try offering to tutor other people for a cheap rate (find out what standard rate is at your school then put up flyers with an email address and accreditations)? Learn to cook. Check out your community college’s registration process for evening class or long-distance online classes before the spring semester. Check out new bands on youtube/see random movies/read a lot of books so that when you get to college you’ll be more prepared to converse with different kinds of people. Research colleges. (By the way, if you’re doing 3 different clubs that meet up once a month, when applying to colleges–at least with the common application–you’ll be asked exactly how many hours per week you spent on each club, which is why I recommended narrowing it down and spending more time on less clubs).</p></li>
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<p>@Jersey13: Fair enough. Brevity isn’t one of my strong points, I admit.</p>

<p>@everary: Great ideas. I’d love to do the video feature thing, and it would’ve been great, if only I was making the club in the middle school. The middle school had morning announcements on our own TV channel, but here we just have them over the intercom (and no one ever really hears them, anyway, since the teachers don’t make us stay quiet while they’re playing). There wouldn’t be any way for me to show the videos to people . . . unless I made a Youtube channel, I guess.</p>

<p>I’m going to try the donut/pizza social, though (we have a donut place right next door, too).</p>

<p>I did mention tutoring jobs in my first post as an alternative to volunteering at the homeless shelter, but they’re not really mutually exclusive or anything, and I know who to contact about that.</p>

<p>Sadly, there are no community colleges within a distance that my parents are willing to drive. I’ll look into online classes, though, I was thinking of signing up for EPGY.</p>

<p>The movie-watching will be covered by Philosophy Club, as a matter of fact, and I’ve got a pretty good grasp of bands I like, I think (haven’t yet found someone I know who likes/has heard of the same bands I have, though). I do read, about a book a week on busy weeks and a book every two days when I have tons of free time.</p>

<p>The thing about narrowing down on clubs is that I haven’t yet been able to think of a club that I’d be willing to drop. I want Math Club and Science Olympiad to be available for their respective competitions, and I’ve been thinking about starting Philosophy Club all summer.</p>

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<p>This is for all intents and purposes a bump, but I feel guilty posting something with no content, so . . .</p>

<p>I put up the posters today. No emails about it yet, though, and I kind of ran out of posters. I’ll Xerox some more tomorrow and put them up. Also, another thing about community colleges - I don’t think my high school lets us sign up for community college classes until junior year, although I’m not sure why I wouldn’t be allowed to join one if it’s after school and I’m not trying to use it to graduate high school earlier.</p>