Keeping Your Education In Check: My top 5 Back To School Tips

Late July to August: A time that some of us love and some of us hate. The time of year that we go flooding our local shops for notebooks and wearing down Amazon workers with our online backpack orders. Wether you love school, tolerate it, or absolutely loath it, back to school season is a period that haunts us all in our own respective ways. Today, I want to share with you my best back to school tips that I have learned over the years. So, in no specific order, here are my top five things to consider when going back to school this year!

1. Get Supplies That You Enjoy Looking At

The first tip that I have to offer, is getting school supplies that you like! It sounds like a given, but honestly, I find that when I get school supplies that I enjoy looking at, I am more prone to use them. This doesn't need to apply to all of your supplies either. You can really use this idea with anything!

For me, I like to portion out my spending for back to school by spending the most on notebooks and the least on pens and pencils. As a person who struggles to take notes, buying notebooks that are more enjoyable to look at makes me want to take notes that reflect the niceness of the book itself. If I buy a notebook that looks cheap, I am less inclined to take good notes, "because the notebook isn't even that nice so why should it matter" and then I end up never taking notes and my motivation keeps going down hill from there. This year, for my school shopping, I bought notebooks in my favorite colors and with my favorite binding styles. I bought yellow folders (my favorite color), and spiral bound notebooks (favorite binding), this way I want to look at them, and want to use them. My favorite notebook this year is my physics notebook! I know that this is a class that I struggle to take notes in, so I bought a notebook that was bound at the top instead of the sides. Since this notebook is unique to my other ones, I want to use it more and it will drive me to take better notes in this class!

As for pens and pencils, I have and always will buy them from the Dollar Tree or wherever I can find them for the cheapest. I still use the same trick of buying pens in my favorite colors and getting pencils that I enjoy using, but buying from Dollar Tree allows me to do so while spending the least and saving my money for other school supplies or anything else in the future. For me, I buy pens in bright colors to organize my notes, and I always buy regular wooden pencils. I spend a few extra dollars on erasers and a pencil sharpener, and I'm good to go! Personally, I find that the pencils don't matter as much as the pens do, but even the pens are less important than the notebooks to me. It doesn't matter what you work with, as long as it works for you! Figure out what you need to get yourself motivated, and account for it!

2. Portion Out Your Money For The Week

Another thing to think of is your spending habits.Think about how much you make, or how much you have access to, and portion out your money weekly. I usually like to give myself fifteen dollars to spend on lunch per week. This gives me two days a week (depending on the pricing of the restaurant) to eat out for school lunch. The other three days of the week, I bring lunch from home. It may not be the most cool looking thing to drag a lunchbox around all day, but trust me when I tell you it is better than blowing up to fifty dollars a week on your favorite meals around your campus.

Another part of this tip is to be compassionate for those around you! If you are more well off financially than your friends, or you have a good paying job that affords your eating habits, try not to make your friends feel bad about their money or how they spend. It is understandable if you can afford to eat out most days, but the reality is that a lot of us can not, and we don't like to be reminded of that every time we have lunch with you. It is ok to not be able to eat out every day of the week. It is not lame of you to bring in a lunch box, and it is not uncool to eat at the same place frequently if it is what you can afford.

Limiting the amount of times you eat out also helps to make the event more enjoyable for you! Imagine eating the same meal several times a week, and not shaking tings up. Your favorite meal would lose its worth and you would make yourself sick of it. However, if your favorite meal is a cold cut at Subway, only let yourself have that once a week or once every few weeks. This will let you keep your love for the food while also preserving your money for the week, and subsequently the year.

3. Get Acquainted With Staff

My third tip is getting to know the staff at you school. Once again, we hit a tip that doesn't immediately sound cool for your ego, but it does help you in the long run. Getting to know your teachers and other staff can help you with a lot of things in and out of the classroom.

Getting aquatinted with staff could be a good idea for those of you starting at a new school this year. It will help you to get a leg up in your classes by making a good impression, and help your teachers to remember you for future things in the classroom as well. This is also helpful even if you are not moving schools! Keeping good impressions with staff is never a bad thing.

Another way this could be helpful is by making the classroom feel more safe to you. If you get to know your teachers, and you build a bond with them, it really does make your life easier when interacting with their class. It makes you feel more comfortable asking for help when you need it, and it help you to feel more comfortable in their presence for the year(s) to come.

4. Get To Know Your Learning Style Before Going Back

I am a firm believer that no two people learn the same way, and that the U.S education system does not account for that. Even though we cannot make any immediate changes to our system, we can take note of ourselves and do the best we can to help ourselves. My best piece of advice for the new school year is to figure out how you learn best, and roll with that. The three things that I keep in mind when it comes to my learning style are as follows:

1. Figure out what note taking method works best for you. for me, I write notes with bullet points and arrows for most of my classes, but for classes that I struggle in conceptually, I use the Cornell method which makes use of sections for notes, summaries, key concepts, etc. Your school might tell you what kind of note taking system to use but I am telling you from one student to another, DO NOT LISTEN TO THEM. If the system doesn't work for you, don't waste your time trying to force it. That will just make your notes sloppy and you will spend more time focussing on the act of taking notes than you will on the actual subject of the notes. Instead, find a method that does work for you and use that.

2. Find wether you focus more with or without food in your stomach. Personally, I find that I function much better with a small breakfast in the mornings and a big lunch for later classes in the afternoon. I also like to bring in a snack pack like nuts and cheese cubes for my second period before lunch so that I have something in my system to keep my body going. Find what works for you! Do you function and focus more with or without breakfast? What size lunch? Snacks?

3. The last thing to figure out is who you focus more around. I'm not stupid and I'm not your teacher, so I know you aren't going to completely ditch your friends to focus on a lesson you didn't want to take. Instead, figure out which of your friends help you to stay motivated more, and which of your friends don't. I know it feels bad to distance from some of our beast friends, but it really is worth it in the long run, and they aren't going to abandon you for taking a class seriously. You don't need to implement this strategy in all of your classes if you don't want to. I think that as long as you know which friends help you when you struggle, you can work with any system that you like.

5. Buy A Planner

The last tip I have for you guys is to buy a planner for yourself! If you don't want to buy a planner, find a scheduling system that helps you and roll with it. For me, I use the same system as the rest of my supplies and buy one that I like to look at. I prefer weekly planners that include pages for the month where I write out any deadlines and important events, and use the other pages between each month for daily to-do lists and homework logging. This sounds tedious, and it may be for some of you, but as I said, you don't need to log the way I do! You don't need to copy me, or anybody else. You can write down anything ranging from your daily to-do list, your schedule of today's homework, time blocking for work/class time. write down any deadlines, and more! You just need to find what you work best with and implement that in your work/school life. Once you get the hang of it and you get used to logging your days/weeks/months, you will be amazed at how much it helps to keep you organized through the school year!

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As always, thank you guys for reading! I had a lot of fun writing this listicle and I hope you enjoyed as well. Make sure to share this with anyone starting school this year who you think would appreciate the help, or just enjoy the read. You can always suggest new article ideas to me through the site, or DM me on my instagram linked below for ideas as well.

Have a good day, and a great school year

Signed,

Lina McGovern