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so I know the spirit eye symbols are supposed to be some cool-religious/but-not-really-hippie-weird-thing that makes you “rad” and “in-touch”, but as someone who was raised on A Series of Unfortunate Events, all I see is that you’re part of a murderous troupe of terrible actors. 

ay, i don’t post but every few years it seems but lemme tell y’all. 

school may be difficult, but it can be managed. I believe in your personal brain power. so here’s some tips for y’all already hating this school semester. 

a- be present in classes. slacking off doesn’t get you good grades. yes, an 8 am class may suck, but what happens when you have to get a job? I wake up at 4 am for my job. it’s good to practice timeliness and being present when you’re half awake. 

b- write your notes by hand. when you write your notes, you’re applying kinetic, visual, and auditory learning abilities. have terrible handwriting? teacher talks quickly? record the class or re-write your notes. repetition is a key component for learning. also, by writing your notes, some of you who may be mostly visual/kinetic/auditory are expanding your learning abilities. and that can only be useful. 

c- know of a classroom that will be empty this evening? stake a claim and use that whiteboard. sometimes it’s great to see everything you’ve learned for the day all at once rather than frantically flipping back and forth through pages of text and notes. also great is how easy it is to make flow charts of info. and for those who like to keep perfectly clean notes, if you mess up, it’s no big deal. triple bonus, great for planning essays. starting with central themes and then branching out to write in other sources, that amazing sentence that came into your head, and getting the general flow of the paper. 

d- essays are difficult. step one, change the essay topic into a how question. a very general example: So-and-so was isolated in Example Army Base during the winter of Whatever-year. When Such-and-such attacked the Example Army Base that winter, he still lost to So-and-so’s army. What did So-and-so do to prevent the Example Army Base from being captured? change this what question to: How did So-and-so prevent the capture of Example Army Base during the winter of Whatever-year? the reason you want to create how questions is that how questions require more explanation. Who, what, when, where questions can be answered simply, but how’s require more work. step two, answer that how question in one to three well thought sentences. BAM, got your thesis statement. step three, explain why you think you thesis statement is correct. not sure if a train of thought can be used? that’s where sources come in. sources are like saying “hey, this idea isn’t crazy! these educated, published, and recognized scholars agree with me!” you don’t use sources to argue, you use them to support your argument. step four, when everything is said and done, read that essay out loud. if it sounds weird verbally, then there’s probably grammatical error. reading out loud is how I check a lot of my spelling mistakes. 

e- take home quiz/test? be careful of what your teacher constitutes as cheating, cause if they catch you collaborating on quizzes with classmates in your school library, good luck. electronic quizzes: team up. I say with groups ranging form 3-5. anymore, it’s too chaotic. any less, not enough help. our professor had a question bank of 20, but the quiz only had 15 questions on it. we would rotate the weekly volunteer who would take the first quiz. they would start their quiz and everyone would scramble to help them get as many correct answers by scouring their notes, books, power point slides, etc. the quiz would time out, and automatically give back a score. conveniently it shows if the answers said volunteer selected were wrong or right for each question. so, if the volunteer got 14 out of fifteen correct, the rest of us had 14 out twenty questions correct. we would continue to the next volunteer, and repeat the process. it’s important to switch the first person out so that one person doesn’t suffer from the lowest grade the whole semester. this also prevents all of our quizzes from being identical repeatedly. paper quizzes: you have way more time to make sure you have the correct answers, however you can’t verify them. also, you have to be sure if they’re written answers not to copy each other word for word. like copy answers directly from the textbook is normal, but copying someone else sets of alarms. 

anyways, hope these help. if I think of more I’ll send more out into the internet abyss.