It’s the home stretch to the end of the year, and many of us are done with being overachievers. That begs the question, how can you maintain good grades while doing less work? Find out in this article…

You catch more flies with honey than vinegar…try to make a good first impression with your new teachers. The teachers you have all year already have an idea of you in your mind, good or bad. New teachers are a blank slate, meaning you decide your relationship with them. You’re allowed to dislike them, but having a good relationship with a teacher will always be in your favor. Do you need to miss a class or make up an assignment you forgot to do? If a teacher thinks you’re a good kid, they’ll let things slide. You shouldn’t rely on this method, but when you truly need more time than one extra day, a good relationship with your teacher comes in handy.

Procrastination Station! The phrase “I’ll do it later” has plagued everyone at least once in their lives. Especially for seniors, it can be easy to put off work until the night before it’s due or even the end of the marking period when grades go in. How do you avoid this annoying yet universal phenomenon? Gaslight yourself. Make up your own due dates and stick to them. This primarily works on long-term work like essays. By setting fake deadlines, you create the anxiety that motivates you to do stuff. It’s easier than you think to trick yourself, procrastination stems from the delusion that you can wait until the last minute to start a project. Deadlines can be overwhelming, but procrastination ends when you’re in control. For further advice on this topic, read Juheon Kim’s article on procrastination here!

C’s get degrees. If you have a lot of work in a class and are stressed out about it, aim for a C. Giving yourself a huge workload in any class is not worth it, especially if the work is for a full-year course. If you did well in the first semester, earning a C in one marking period allows you to fix your grade in the next, giving you at least a B for your final grade. Your transcript does not spell out what grade you got for each term, so colleges won’t care if you relaxed for a marking period as long as your overall grade is a B or higher. If the difference between a C+ and B is hours of work, it’s not worth your time to stress over. A better use of your time is to start preparing for the class’s final or other exams in advance. If you understand most of what you’ve been taught all year, you’ll be more prepared for new material. This will earn you a higher grade in the last marking period and final exam, giving you a grade you can be proud of.

Look into the crystal ball… With seniors committing to college and underclassmen going through course selection, many of us have been thinking about our futures. We want to have a map of the future and have it guide us to our ‘destination,’ our goals in life. However, many of us fail to see that our goals are ever changing and our fate will be as random as it has always been. Just because you didn’t get an A+ in AP Photography doesn’t mean you can’t become an editor for Vogue. At the end of the day, all we can do is do what we need to do to stay sane. As everyone in school starts to turn to a new page of their life, always know that you are the one who controls your goals and decisions. Many of us long for our fortune to be told and never realize that we are the ones writing the cards.