Due this week

General Writing. Send in your best work – poems, short stories, essays. (Feel free to do it throughout the year, but this gives you a deadline.)
Deadline: Oct. 10.

To submit to Newspaper Series

  • Log in. (Click "Not a YWP member?" to create an account.)

  • Click "create content" and create an ENTRY
  • Fill out "title," "author name, school & grade" and "prompt" boxes.
  • Paste story into "body."
  • Click "Submit." You are done.
    NOTES: Your account email must be accurate; a "blog" entry must be resubmitted as an ENTRY to be considered.

Fixing Mistakes

Submitted by mpc827 on May 12, 2008 - 00:52.

My name is Addison Olevnik. I want to talk about what I have messed up in life. This is not just so I can rant about my problems, and none of this is made up, I am just stating my experiences in life to hopefully open your eyes, and to hopefully help you avoid mistakes.

Well lets start at the beginning of my education, elementary school. Starting at about 5th grade, I just never was able to do homework. There was a huge lack of interest, feeling school was just going to fly by. Well I was obviously wrong. Until 8th grade, it was the same, nearly failing due to lack of doing my homework. Even through all the meetings with teachers I just never started doing my homework.

Then came freshman year, grade 9. By 9th grade I was no better at doing my homework. Still had tons of meetings, detentions, and conflicts with parents. However by the end of grade 9, I ended up failing and missing half a credit. Well now I am at the end of 10th grade, and apparently that motivation of needing to make up that half credit didn't help any. I am now failing most of my classes, but now feel like I need to change that.

I sat down with several people and talked about different things. My study hall teacher Jan Noskey has been a ton of help this past month. After realizing I needed help, I talked with her about how I could get the fullest out of math courses. So she helped me with that, then afterwords we worked on improving my grades in other classes. It is probably too late to fix it, but it will be nice to actually try for once. Thanks to just her and my counselor, Robin Ellison, I finally have an understanding as to why education is important. Hopefully I will now be able to pick up the pace, and get somewhere in life.

Pretty much, all I am saying is, don't let mistakes catch up on you. Mistakes are fixable, and if you need help, then get help. There are people out there that would love to help you. Just try not to wait until it all piles up. Just identify your problem, and solve it.

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