Learn From These First Nine Weeks

For Broward County High Schools students, the first quarter of the academic year has wrapped up.

If you're on a seven-period schedule, it marks the half-way point, and your first interim.

If you're like me, on a block schedule, I know you've felt the stress of taking midterms and have your first official four grades under your belt already.

How do you feel?

If you could take something back, would you have:

Studied for the chemistry test you knew you were going to have some trouble on? Started your Spanish notebook way before it was due? Got off that gaming website that was sucking all your time away?

As always, there's some good news and bad news.

The bad news is that you can't actually take it back; you earned your grades and there are no "do-over's" in high school.

The more inspiring news, and the point of my blog, is this cliché: You can learn from your mistakes.

So you may have started off a little badly, but we're all human here, right? We have every right and all the power within ourselves to turn it all around and have a successful year with minimum stress. If you're aware of something you could have improved on, well, IMPROVE UPON IT!

There's no sense in fueling the fire.

Look back on these first nine weeks, and take it as a learning experience. You know what you did incorrectly, so target those tasks and figure out how to convert them into "good" skills to have, like shutting off your phone while you work, or really paying attention to what you're reading.

I guarantee that it will pay off in the long run, and you'll realize that you can still have fun along the way :)