A learning experience that stuck with me is my junior year of high school. During this time , I had spent my first year back in Brooklyn after spending middle school and my freshman year of high school in Long Island. Since I moved back to Brooklyn during the summer of 2020 I had to spend my sophomore year of high school fully remote so I wasn’t really motivated to do good in school and got really lazy with my schoolwork. When junior year started , the classes I was originally put in were ones I had already taken in my sophomore  , 8th grade or freshman year because in my school in Long Island they had us take regents and regent classes in 8th grade instead of 9th grade like many NYC high schools do.

The first month of junior year was mostly me trying to adjust to being back in brooklyn and getting used to the people and environment in the school. But in October the school had realised I was above the 11th grade level classes and they had switched me out of those classes , in the middle of the day. My guidance counsellor had called me into her office to tell me that she didn’t like how I was sitting in classes I already took or didn’t need. She explained to me how she had put me into more senior and AP classes because she felt that I was ready to take them. So instead of taking algebra II , which I had taken the year prior , I was put into AP calculus. She also put me into AP English , biomedical science , and a college math course. I remember going home upset because I was still dealing with the anxiety of being in a new school around new people and now I had to prepare myself for these classes because I knew I had to work harder in these classes. Online learning had impacted the way I did my work and my motivation to do work because I didn’t have to do much to pass and get good grades. Even when I had gone back to school in person that year I wasn’t fully motivated because I already did the work or was familiar with the lessons. But once I got put into these classes I told myself to really focus on my work and get it together if I really wanted to graduate high school.

My guidance counsellor didn’t give me any work to catch up on before I went to my new classes so I needed to do month-old work for 3 classes. My biomedical , AP English and college math class were easy to catch up on because the work was mostly online but my AP calculus teacher only handed out worksheets and he didn’t have any leftover papers for me to turn in so he waved those assignments for me. Unfortunately , he had a test planned the same week I joined the class and I missed the entire topic the test was covering. Knowing i missed the topic and couldn’t make up the assignments , he still made me take the test because he felt that the review we had done the day before would help me. I was stressed this whole week and this was when I realised how bad remote learning affected me. I had started watching Youtube videos and Khan Academy to try and teach myself the lesson which is  something I haven’t done since middle school. I of course failed the test but it definitely motivated me to pay attention more and be on top of my math work more since I know I struggle with it the most. I had done the same thing in my college math course . Everything the teacher would assign homework , a problem set that would be from 40-100 questions , I would always start it in class and work on it as soon as I got home. In my biomedical class and ap english class , they would assign classwork online and let us finish it for homework. After a while I noticed that I didn’t always have time to finish my problem sets and online homework all in one night so I would try to finish in class and whatever I had left over , I would finish it during lunch or during my health class since I would always finish my work early. In my calculus class the classwork and the homework was on the same sheet of paper. So once he would finish teaching the lesson and would give the assigned problems for classwork and homework I would do both during the rest of class time and hand in the paper at the end. This usually gave me time to do other maths work if I needed to since he would only assign 4 to 5 questions each.

Before the second semester of junior year started my guidance counsellor was telling me how she was proud that I had kept my grades up during the first semester and how she was happy I was able to adapt to the new classes and it honestly stuck with me because I never actually took the time to realise how much my learning and work habits changed throughout sophomore and junior year. I took the time to care about how my work would come out and put in effort to what I was doing, especially projects and essays. I had much more self discipline and time management skills and I hardly missed deadlines.When I went into second semester the only class that changed was biomedical science. I now had forensic science but it was still the same teacher so the habits I had made in biomedical were still useful here too. I had ended junior passing all my classes and was ranked 6th overall in the class of 2023. When we got our transcripts back I had noticed that the credits I had gotten brought me above the number of credits needed to graduate and that I would be able to graduate with an advanced regents diploma.

Once senior year came around and I had gotten my schedule , I knew that the only class I needed to pass to be able to graduate was my English class. Most of my other classes were electives. This did not change the way I did my work though. I was still finishing my classwork and homework in one class period and I was still finishing other work whenever I had the time to. I had a lot more essays to do in English and I would take hours out of my day to focus on only that essay. The second semester of my senior year was different. Since I’ve been on track since junior year , I was able to leave school 3 hours earlier and I only had 5 classes and 4 out of the 5 were electives. I had 2 more essays to write during the semester and I would sometimes write the essay while I was hanging out with my friends. When I graduated , I had gotten my advanced regents diploma and I had gotten an award for having a high overall average since I’ve been in that school.

Now that I’m in college I definitely still use these habits while I do my work. I set time aside to get as much work done as I can , I try to take as much notes as I can and find the lecture notes and copy down whatever I missed when i get home. If I’m given an assignment in class I try to do as much as I can while I’m there and if I can’t I’ll go to the library or the academic building to have a quiet space to finish the rest. I’m getting better at time management and procrastinating and I hope to figure out how to be better by the time the semester ends so I can be more successful throughout my college years and graduate with even better stats than my high school ones.