Balancing School And Sports

I’ve always been an unusually busy person. I’ve done swimming since I was five, dance since I was around six, debate and public speaking since I was ten, and guzheng since I was six. I’ve also been reading, writing, and playing piano, and drawing on and off for most of my life. Other than that, I have swim meets and travel meets, debate tournaments, speech competitions, performances, and orchestra.

But because I’m Chinese, it was kind of the expected norm for me to also get good grades in school. And I did that. I’ve been getting straight A’s since third grade. (All grades before third grade don’t count because I didn’t know English back then.)

However, balancing out school life and extracurriculars can be stressful at first. When I first started sixth grade, I had so much homework every day. On days when I had both swim and dance, I often had to stay up late to finish my work, which affected my performance in both my academics and my practices.

Eventually, I eased into the busy lifestyle of balancing out my life, and it’s not as difficult as you might think. One of the very first things I did was to do as much work as possible during school. During lunch and recess, I brought out my pencils, paper, and textbooks to finish my homework beforehand. That got about one–third of my homework out of the way.

Doing this gave me more time to rest and recover from my sports, lessening my stress greatly. And it wasn’t like I was missing out on anything. Most of the time during recess and lunch, I gossiped with my friends when instead I could have been multitasking. That way, for the day, I could get my daily dose of gossip and enough sleep.

Another thing I did was to read and study before bed. I have no idea if this is just for a small group of the population or for everyone, but before I went to bed every night, I read the text I needed to memorize for tests, and by doing this before bed, I could remember the text better. There is a bit of science behind this. When you sleep, you go through a bunch of sleep cycles. And when information is fresh in your mind, your sleep cycles are able to process it better for the next day.

I don’t know if this works for everyone, but it does work for me, and I get better grades than the people who stay up till three in the morning reviewing notecards, so…

Bonus: if you have trouble sleeping at night like I do, I think reading after you’re done getting ready for bed is definitely a factor that can help this. This way, instead of stressing pointlessly in your mind, you can imagine fictional characters in the scenes you just read. And when I do that, it always morphs into a dream, and I fall asleep. (Yes, I do remember falling asleep—sometimes.)

You’re welcome. I just saved you three hours of crying over some history test about the Roman alphabet.

One last factor that helped me deal with stress was a good friend group. You can vent to your friends, you can gossip with them, you can tell them sensitive information without them revealing it to anyone (mostly). It’s like the in-person version of ChatGPT!

In all seriousness, though, having people who support you outside of your family was definitely an element that carried me through the difficult times of adjusting to a busy lifestyle.

That was my little guide on how to balance out school and sports. Learning to adjust quickly to an industrious life can definitely help you out in the future.