How to get good grades as a student-athlete

Okay, so today I'm going to be talking about how to get good grades as a student athlete. And if you don't know who I am, I'm Tren Lora. I'm a former college quarterback. As far as academics, track record, I graduated with a 4.19 GPA on a 4.0 scale. I went to high academic school where, yes, kids were getting 4.5s, 4.6s, 4.7s. I took seven AP classes, eight AP tests, 1230 SAT, and I believe either 28 or 29 ACT. Nothing too crazy, don't get me wrong. Not a genius, but pretty decent stuff. And ultimately my biggest accomplishment, I did not study much, I did not put much effort into my schooling. And so today I'm going to share four tips with you to get better grades that work for me. You can try them. Hopefully they work. If they don't, no worries. So let's dive into it. Number one, the most obvious one to me at least is pay attention to class. Like the biggest return I got in my time in the classroom was just being there, aware of what's going on in the class. Because as long as I paid attention during class and really like try to internalize and think through and did everything I possibly could to learn during that class time, it made the tests and quizzes very easy. And maybe I just had really good teachers, I probably did. So shout out to them. Not everybody's as fortunate. But paying attention to their lectures, paying attention to what was going on, exercises that we did, et cetera, heavily translated to what we did in the tests, in the quizzes, in the projects, everything like that. And made it easy because most of the time either they were creating this or they were going off of certain books that they were referencing the quizzes from. And so it just made it easy when you already know the terms what they're talking about most of the time, they're setting you you up for that. And so just being able to lock in is probably the hardest part. It's only going to get harder as people's attention span shorten with social media and everything like that. But that is the biggest thing I can say is pay attention in class. I know it can be hard. Trust me, plenty of times I wasn't paying attention as much as I should have in class. But anytime I was struggling in class, that was what I did. I paid attention during class as much as possible and got the most out of my time. Number two, and this helps with number one, is taking notes. I always took notes in classes. I can't really think of too many classes where I didn't take notes. Just writing gave me. It wasn't as much as I would go back and look at the notes. So sometimes I did. It was writing down what I, What I was seeing, what I was hearing gave me the opportunity to kind of like see it as well. And I'm much more of a visual person. I'm not very good at audio. And so allowing me to write allowed me to see the words. Almost giving me a transcript in real time as well as it just gives you more memory, I believe. I think there's a study somewhere which I have the reference to. Um, plus, it, it makes. It gives you something active to do rather than just, you know, when you lean back and are kind of slacking off, it's easy to lose your focus versus when you're riding. At least you're. You're locked in on something. And so it gave me something to do while paying attention. Number three, this is a big one. This is just a tactical one is just like avoiding zeros. That's the biggest thing. I didn't. I don't think I had ever had any zeros in high school. And that was a huge thing for me because zeros just kill your grade. I mean, you think grade is just an average of the amount of assignments and quizzes and tests. And I don't think it's necessarily a great way to grade our students, but it's how they do it. And so you just have to play that game, sadly. And the biggest thing is avoiding zeros. A 70%, 60%, 50%, 50% is infinite times better than a zero percent. And that's where it really kills your grade. And so avoid the zeros. Turn in your homework, do all that stuff. Do as much as possible to avoid that. And obviously it will help you out a ton just mathematically. So avoid the zeros. Number four, talk to the teacher. I probably wasn't the best at this, but I can say that just from the experience in the classes that I felt like I got a little more leniency was when I talked to the teacher, just was kind to the teacher, everything like that because they, they aren't there. They do not get rewarded by being mean to you or not getting leniency. It doesn't matter. They're not. I mean, I know there's like certain state testing and stuff like that. They do get rewards, but the difference between giving a kid a B and giving kid a C, they're still going to get paid out the same, it's not compensated to where they are more inclined to give kids C's. And so talk to the teacher, be active in that and that will help you out a ton. The last tip I can give is a little bonus tip is doing homework during school time. This is a big reason why I say I didn't study. I didn't do like, I mean I probably did study a few times. Very few though. And the reason was I would do my homework any assignments I could during class time. Obviously like there were some times I did during the lectures and stuff like that. But doing the homework saved me time being a student athlete. Like most of the time I was going from, you know, we had workouts at our high school probably at 6:37 and then I wouldn't get back home until 7pm after practice. And so the last thing I wanted to do was get home from practice and then have to do an hour worth of homework. Half an hour and a half, two hours. Especially after you shower, eat, you're talking 8pm, you're starting your homework. I just didn't want to do that. And so I found ways to squeeze that in into the classes. Whether that was after this the class was done or during the little breaks or whatever I could find to squeeze out a couple minutes of that. And so just a big tip there like because yeah, you could probably be on your phone for a couple minutes but it'll feel much better at the end of the day when you can just relax rather than having to correct for time that you kind of wasted there in school. So just some food for that there. But regardless, hopefully this helps. Again, you know, just use what's best for you. But these are just some tips that work for me. Works for you. Awesome. If it doesn't do works, what works best for you? So if you like this, be sure to like and subscribe and I'll see you in the next one. Peace.