Struggling with my mind on freshmen year.

Pre-College Issues High School Life
1

For alittle backstory: Im a freshmen (Has Honors Algebra 2) and ive been looking forward for a great social life.

However, my grades are abit iffy. Infact ive been doing terrible this 1st quarter. I did horrible on my honors algebra 2 (failing acutally) Ive screwed myself on switching teachers and such. Ive been kicking my own ass this year. Ive forgot about clubs and ive been more focused about sports lately.

I feel like ive been kinda lazy on not doing my own work.

I need some motovation. I want to get above a 4.0 GPA. I have half of 1st semester and 2nd semester.

2

Don’t be lazy, do your work, Ace your tests. There’s no magic here, just pick yourself up and work hard.

3

If you have missing assignments, you should turn those in, even if only for half credit. As for motivation, I like to set timers for homework: 30 minutes of work, 15 minutes on my phone. Knowing it’s not going to be endless homework really helps me focus.

4

A few obvious comments: High school is going to be harder than middle or elementary school. University/college is going to be harder than high school. Jumping ahead to more advanced classes just makes things harder still, and is only a good idea if you are very confident that you can handle the faster academic pace in more difficult and challenging courses.

Also, math is an area where what you learn today is very dependent upon what you learned yesterday and last year, and what you are going to learn tomorrow and next year is going to depend upon what you are learning now. As such it is very important to catch up and keep up with your math. This is the basis for a LOT that you are going to do in the next 3 years and the next 7 years and depending upon your career very likely the next 50 years. All future math classes and a lot of STEM courses and some other subjects also will be very dependent upon Algebra 2.

You need to show up on class, sit near the front if you can, always pay attention, and keep ahead of your homework and reading. It would be best if you do homework the day that it is assigned and NOT just before it is due. Get extra help after school either from your teacher or from a tutor.

You are in high school now and taking an advanced class and you need to improve your study skills. There are no secrets to keeping up with a difficult course. It takes work.

5
  1. GO TO CLASS, READ THE CHAPTERS, AND DO THE HOMEWORK!
  2. Go to Teacher’s office hours early in the semester and Ask this question: “I know this is a really difficult class-- what are some of the common mistakes students make and how can I avoid them?”
  3. If you have problems with the homework, go to Teacher’s office hours. If they have any “help sessions” or “study sessions” or “recitations” or any thing extra, go to them.
  4. Form a study group with other kids in your class.
  5. Don’t do the minimum…for STEM classes do extra problems. You can buy books that just have problems for calculus or physics or chemistry whatever. Watch online videos (e.g., Khan Academy) on line about the topic you are studying.
  6. If things still are not going well, get a tutor. Your National Honor Society will have some.
  7. Read this book: How to Become a Straight-A Student: The Unconventional Strategies Real College Students Use to Score High While Studying Less by Cal Newport. It helps you with things like time management and how to figure out what to write about for a paper, etc.
  8. For tests that you didn’t do well on, can you evaluate what went wrong? Did you never read that topic? Did you not do the homework for it? Do you kind of remember it but forgot what to do? Then next time change the way you study…there may be a study skill center at your college.
  9. How much time outside of class do you spend studying/doing homework?
  10. If you run into any social/health/family troubles (you are sick, your parents are sick, someone died, broke up with boy/girlfriend, suddenly depressed/anxiety etcetc) then immediately go to the guidance counselor and talk to them.
  11. At the beginning of the semester, read the syllabus for each class. It tells you what you will be doing and when tests/HW/papers are due. Put all of that in your calendar. The teacher may remind you of things, but it is all there for you to see so take initiative and look at it.
  12. Make sure you understand how to use your online class system…Login to it, read what there is for your classes, know how to upload assignments (if that is what the teacher wants).
  13. If you get an assignment…make sure to read the instructions and do all the tasks on the assignment. Look at the rubric and make sure you have covered everything.
  14. If you are not sure what to do, go EARLY to the teacher’s office hours…not the day before the assignment is due.
  15. Take advantage of any “re-do” tests you may be able to take…your teacher wants you to learn the material. Future material depends on it so you need to have the foundation. By explaining what went wrong you really understand it. Take advantage of this.
6

Take my advice with careful consideration, seeing as I am a high schooler myself (senior) and not a counselor or anything like that.

You have three more years ahead of you, and if your current academic situation is a result of a failure to understand material rather than just a need to adapt to a high school setting, things will not get any easier, especially around junior year, when the most competitive students will have extremely rigorous schedules with close to all, if not all, college-level courses (AP, DE, IB, and AICE). I have seen several of my friends experience disappointing drops in GPA as course rigor increases. Your goal of a 4.0 or above will be essentially impossible to obtain if you continue to receive poor grades as you have done right now.

Even after taking this into consideration, if you are flat out failing Algebra 2, you should not continue on your advanced math track, which generally includes Pre-Calculus H in 10th and AP Calculus in 11th. As DadTwoGirls said, math concepts build on each other; if you fail to learn a newly-taught concept, you can’t just shrug your shoulders after bombing the chapter test and hope that the new chapter is easier because the material doesn’t go away; in fact, it follows you throughout the rest of the course you are in AND every successive course in your math sequence. If you are totally unable to handle or understand the material you are learning right now to the point where you are at risk of failing the entire course, it would be extremely self-destructive to willingly expose yourself to successive courses that build off of the material you are learning now and happen to be even more complex, assuming the school lets you take them. I am saying this not to be mean-spirited, but out of concern that you will dig yourself deeper into a hole than you already have.

I used to blank out on tests and not do as well as I would like to, and I’ve found that doing practice problems over and over and over again helps tremendously, both by providing exposure to the material AND reducing anxiety, especially on the morning of the exam. Be sure you know every type of problem that will be on an exam and that you do each of those; one time, I reviewed all but one section of a chapter that we were going to be tested on, and lo and behold, I got every single problem based on the sections I reviewed right and every single problem on the section I did not review wrong. By the way, I used all of these tips for my own Algebra 2 Honors class and my College Algebra class (which covers very similar material).

If I were you, I would try to get my affairs in order to the best of my ability this quarter in attempt to produce decent semester grades, although your chances of obtaining strong semester grades in your courses may be extremely low due to your apparently “iffy” first quarter grades (especially Algebra 2; assuming your grading scale is <60 is an F, even if you earn a perfect 100 for your quarter 2 average, your grade will not average out to be anything more than a C+).