As this first quarter comes to a close, most of us are thinking about what we might and might not have done differently during these past few months. It’s true that quarter grades aren’t extremely important; some teachers refer to them as a “glorified progress report”. However, the quarter grades are sometimes an indication of what the semester grades might look like in December.
As a sophomore here at Pitman, I have spent a lot of my time stressing about my grades simply because I tend to be a more focused student. I enjoy getting good grades and I usually work hard to get them. As more and more homework got piled onto my workload this quarter, I realized that I couldn’t always go above and beyond when it comes to grades unless I never wanted to do anything else but study. I decided that I had to make a choice between getting amazing grades or keeping my sanity and sleeping habits.
I came to the realization that although grades are an important part of my life, there are other things I’m interested in, too. Honestly, I’m only going to be young once in my lifetime and I don’t want to sacrifice the other things I enjoy doing. For instance, I also volunteer at Emanuel Medical Center as a receptionist at the front desk. Apart from community service, I play guitar for fun, read, write, draw, and edit for this school paper. I liked having creative outlets outside of school and getting bogged down in all my homework was a little depressing.
To be able to continue in my creative pursuits, I decided that I needed to be even more proactive about school than ever before. I also focused on being more organized so I’m less stressed, and I set aside an hour or two after school every day to relax and enjoy time by myself. It doesn’t lessen my workload any, but I’m a lot less frustrated with the amount of time I spend on homework afterwards. On a typical day before, I would sometimes work from 4:00 until 9:30 at night on homework alone. That doesn’t count studying, eating, or doing chores around the house.
If I thought my workload was bad, some of my friends had it even worse. That also might cancel out the possibility that I’m just the crazy one in this situation. I don’t work at an alarmingly slow rate so I don’t think that was the reason why it took me so long. My friends and I compared workloads sometimes and I even felt lucky for not having it as bad as others. It was so frustrating, that some of us even felt like giving up completely.
Instead of giving up, it just wasn’t possible for me to be a perfectionist on every single assignment all the time. In any spare time that I have, I now try and get easy assignments out of the way quickly. If I’m feeling tired on one night, I end up having to put off assignments that aren’t immediately due until the next day. Staying up really late at night just for a few extra homework points just doesn’t feel worth it to me anymore. I like sleep too much.
As this first quarter came to a close, I think I might have gotten a high GPA if I had straight A’s but I’m pretty sure that I didn’t. I decided that I’m okay with that because all I can say is that I tried my best with what I had. With the classes that I’m taking right now, it’s hard to maintain perfect grades in every class, so I choose which classes are more important to me and try my best to stay organized.
I’ve become a lot more comfortable with myself and my grades at school simply because I decided to relax a little bit. My work is hard, but there are many different uncontrollable factors that affect me during school. Sometimes things go wrong, but all I can really hope for is to keep trying my best when I can, and not stress as much about it when I can’t.