5) Develop relations:

Developing a healthy relation with your teachers is very important. Firstly despite all that you have been told, teachers will treat and grade you differently based on their personal opinion of you (they can’t help it, they will always be influenced by their opinions… even if it’s slightly). Having better relations with your teachers could result in any of the following (hopefully all):

You can hand in you work late (Sometime…. If you’re usually respectful, do your work on time and do it well, your teachers will understand that there might be reasons behind your late submission)

You can get better grades in general (if teachers think that you put a lot of effort into your homework they are likely to mark you generously, as they believe you will show progress over time)

You will be able to get better predicted scores (same logic as that from above)

You will receive better feedback (if the teachers think you will listen to their advice and their work will not be wasted, then they are likely to invest more effort into giving you better feedback)

Teachers are humans too, and usually they are rather interesting people, getting to know them and joking around are an integral parts of all high school experience (btw….your mutual hate of the IB is a great point of conversation).

6) Stop Day-dreaming:

It’s time to snap back to reality and understand your true abilities. Don’t take this call to action as an invitation to give up and under estimate yourself, use it as an opportunity to understand your abilities and improve them. To be able to do well in the IB, you need to know what your working abilities, strengths and weakness are. The more information you have the better you will be able to organize yourself and perform well, take the examples below:

If you know you are level 5 student at Mathematics SL, yet you also know that you haven’t been studying much lately and that in general you are both productive and have a mathematically inclined mind. This information tells you that with relatively little effort you could score a 7 instead of a 5, hence you should start revising regularly (investing effort will give you a very visible outcome). However If you are a level 5 student without a particularly mathematical mind, you know that you will need to apply even more effort to reach the level 6 or 7, hence you could invest said effort into subjects which require the least effort to improve (apply your energy effectively, target easily improvable subjects first to maximize your grade relative to the effort you put in). This is a simple example, but it’s meant to highlight how you should invest time revising.

Another example could be as follows; say you believe that you can work 5 hours a day, and that your English assignment will only take 4 hours to do, this means that leaving it to the last day won’t be a problem. But what if you over estimated your abilities and that in reality you only ever get 3 hours of work done a day, BAM! We have a problem, you won’t be able to finish your English assignment to your desired quality. However if you had known that your daily output never exceeded 3 hours you could have split your work over 2 days. I wrote an interesting article on procrastination and output, it’s linked below.