As a tenth grade student at the Dayton Regional STEM School, I have had good moments, bad moments, and flat out struggles. All students have struggles, whether it is doing homework each night, or studying for tests. There are tons of students, and each and every one of them has struggles. As a student, I would know. My own personal struggle is with studying vocab. In Language Arts we have vocab words, there not technique words, there stems of words. We get 25 new stems every other week. And on the weeks where we don’t have new words, we have a review quiz over every single stem word that we have learned. At this point, we have 275 stem words that we have to have memorized. It’s a lot to handle, and it gets harder each week that we get new words. My biggest struggle has been studying those stems, it takes time. And learning them can be frustrating.

 

             But to overcome this challenge I have been constructing note cards for each new set. As a matter of fact, the teacher encourages that we make them. And using those notecards is much easier then writing them down on a piece of paper and studying from that. Note cards were helpful because there easy to study with alone, but there even better to study with when you have two people doing it. Note cards were a really simple way to help me study for vocab words. I had never really thought of it before so it was extremely helpful when the teacher mentioned it to the class. Even though I had the note cards I still found it difficult to study the words, I wasn’t motivated. Becoming motivated for any type of studying is difficult. Especially when you have to do it each week. I struggled with the quizzes each week, it was clear because my grade was dropping.  That was it, once I saw how much my grade was affected through not studying, I decided to begin to study each and every night for five to ten minutes. That’s all I had to do, it was easier than waiting until the last day and then trying to cram 25 words into my head. It obviously wasn’t working and wasn’t effective. Once I began studying each night for five to ten minutes, my grades were improving. Vocab tests are not difficult at all once you study for just a little bit each night. They were an easy grade boost!

 

               The only problem was the review quizzes became more and more large. The amount of words that we had to know increased. At this point it was difficult to keep 200 note cards with me to study from. I knew that I would end up losing the note cards by trying to bring them home. Although I tried to tie rubber bands around all the words. Nothing really seemed to do to trick. Throughout the next couple of days, I learned that there was a quizlet that contained every individual list of words as well as all of the lists for review. Because it was all on the computer I didn’t have to bring all of those note cards with me, wherever I went. Using quizlet was much more reliable and convenient. I enjoyed quizlet more than I did normal not cards. But on quizlet my favorite feature was the note cards. I could use them on my phone on my school laptop or at home.

 

                 Throughout my struggles as a tenth grader, I have learned that there is always a way to overcome them. It started out as one struggle but turned into two. I was able to overcome both of those challenges. As I look at past struggles from previous grades I realize that even though I overcame a certain challenge, it lead to another one sooner or later. Although learning vocab words may be easier for other students. I had a hard time with them, and I have found a method for studying them that works for me. I can officially say that I have completely overcome this challenge.