Do Your Work, You Won’t Regret it

Good morning English IV white day period two. It is my displeasure to be presenting in front of you all today. But this speech is mandatory and I’d like to graduate, so here we go. For incoming Freshman’s sake I’d like to say that high school isn’t all that it is made out to be. I can only speak on behalf of my own experiences in high school, but to me there was nothing fantastic about it. There’s no recess, the classes are longer, and the kids might be a little bigger “not me, of course”, but high school is just school.

I’m not someone who should be giving advice to anyone, but through my four years at Oak Hill High School I’ve made plenty of mistakes that will at least teach you not to be like me. The best piece of advice I could give to you regarding high school, is to do your work, you won’t regret it. Teachers, parents, and friends will tell you all the time, not to leave your work to the last minute. But if you’re anything like me, you won’t do your work till the last minute everytime. This is the worst thing you can do to yourself as a student, it will cause you immense amounts of unnecessary stress, and will pretty much ruin high school for you. This sounds like an exaggeration but it really isn’t; If you do assignments as they as they’re assigned, it frees up so much of your time and frees you from the stress of not passing. Obviously I don’t have much experience with that free feeling, but I wish did. Maybe I would have enjoyed high school a little more. Every semester consisted of coasting through classes until the last two weeks, then accelerating to a million miles an hour to get all of my work done. I suggest to all incoming Freshman that you break the cycle by not leaving your work for the last minute.

I have one very traumatising experience in my high school life, it lasted for about two semesters, and it was called Geometry. Math has never been my forte, but I was always able to do just enough to get by. But Geometry was an absolute nightmare for me, I could not grasp the concepts at all; SOHCAHTOA sounded like a word from some alien language. In the other math classes I had taken I was able to pass the tests just by paying attention in class, so of course I never did any of the homework. This is another huge mistake that taught me a terrible habit of not doing my formatives to prepare me for the summatives. I failed nearly every Geometry took that year, and almost didn’t earn the credit because it took so much longer for me to go back and do the homework I needed to do in the first place. This was such a backwards way of doing things and a complete waste of time. It is much better to get out of your own way, and just do the work so you can pass the test on your first try.

Reflecting on all of my bad grades, and missing assignments from my high school career, got me wondering what it was about me that made it so hard to do my school work, it couldn’t be just because I’m not intelligent. I realized that I’m terrified of failing, which is probably relatable for a lot of you. Ironically, being afraid of failing caused a lot of my failures in high school. I didn’t want to embarrass myself by turning in an assignment that wasn’t good so I would just not turn it in until I absolutely had to. I would be embarrassed to get help, because I didn’t want to seem like a bad student that didn’t understand what to do in the class.  Don’t be like me, don’t be afraid to take the first step. Start the essay, or the math project, or whatever it is, even if you have no idea what you are doing; Because it is better to fail when you still have time to get help from your teachers. Failure isn’t something you should be afraid of, it is something that will help you grow and improve yourself.

Unfortunately for me the time machine has not been invented yet, so there is no way I can go back in time to have a more successful high school career. The intent of this speech is not to scare freshman about how hard high school is and what a terrible time they’ll have. I simply want to share my mistakes and things I regret, in hopes that they might avoid these things and have a better more enjoyable experience than I did. Hopefully in my future at Central Maine Community College I’ll listen to my own advice, and stay on top of my work.

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