Semester: Won

As this week comes close to an end just before Thanksgiving break, it’s starting to hit me that the semester is almost over. After Thanksgiving, we only have two weeks of class and then Finals and Christmas Break. I guess this has come as a shock to me because I’m not as stressed with the closing of the semester as I have in the past. I consider Semester 1: Won. Get it? It’s a pun. Even at the beginning of the semester back in September I wrote a blog about how I was doing so much better and was so much calmer than in years past because of the effects that Innovation Diploma has had on my confidence level. Last year I barely made it out of Pre-Calculus with a B first semester, but now in AP Calculus I will finish the semester with an A for sure!

I’ve been looking a lot into this idea of student confidence to promote interest this semester. If you have not read my previous posts, they will help give more context to my study. I set out to look into student confidence and interest because of my change in school this semester. I’ve had some great progress recently, but yesterday I had a lot. In Innovation Diploma we had a strengths coach come in to help us understand our strengths from the Gallup Strengths test. I had taken this test at camp in May when I was training to be a camp counselor, but it was super cool to go into more depth about them. What I found most fascinating is that even if someone has one of the same strengths as you, the paragraph that describes that strength’s details, is completely different from yours. Isn’t that crazy that characteristics can have variations within themselves?? I thought so. This got me thinking about how many different strength’s there are within a student body and how we can cater to all of them. By understanding my strengths, I believe that it’s given me confidence to do well because I’m not focused on my set backs, but I see possibility. How can we help students see more of the good in themselves than they see the bad? Confidence does not come from the validation of actions, but true confidence from the understanding of strengths and the ability to value them more than weakness. So I challenge everyone who reads this to encourage someone, not because of a skill or an action, but because of something innate that makes them who they are. I want to shift the mindset to the encouragement of individualization, instead of the validation of actions. Just imagine the confidence you can instill in the people around you just by valuing what makes them different.