Surviving High School: Tips and Tricks to Help You Get By

Written by: Ashley George

The beginning of December means that the beginning of the holiday season has arrived. It’s getting colder outside, people bundle up to stay warm, and it seems to be the perfect weather to relax at home. Also, what would the holidays be without all the warm food and baked goods? For this week’s stress-less tactic, I decided that I would bake cookies to give to my EE supervisor, my counselor, and my college recommenders. Doing something productive yet fairly simple in nature has shown to reduce stress as it forces the mind to focus on accomplishing a task. Also, showing appreciation to those around you can help combat the negative emotions that result from stress.

I decided that I wanted to make chocolate chip cookies and cookie cutter sugar cookies that I could decorate for the holidays. When I told some friends of mine about this idea, they agreed and decided to make cookies for some of their teachers as well. We worked together to get all of the ingredients that we needed during the week before meeting on Saturday to start the baking and packaging process. I was in charge of getting the sugar cookie mix and the frosting for the cookies. We had decided that we should use a boxed version of the sugar cookies to ensure that they would hold their shape when we used the cookie cutters. The chocolate chip cookie recipe that a friend of mine found was not too complicated, and we were easily able to assemble all of the necessary ingredients in time. As for decorations, we each brought different types of sprinkles and cookie cutters from our own kitchens to share.

Once Saturday finally arrived, I was so excited to start baking. Not only was I going to do something that would take my mind off of my stressful school work, but I was also getting to spend time with my friends. We planned to make around 45 cookies in total to split amongst the three of us, so that we would have enough to give to our teachers. We ended up making a few extra which served as the taste-test of our wonderful creations. The process took a little longer than we thought it would, but that was mostly because we were listening to Christmas music at the same time and goofing off. After the baking process was over, we began to decorate. We each had fun creating our own designs on our cookies and experimenting with different types of sprinkles. Once we reached the final product, we packaged the cookies in small cellophane bags that had christmas trees and stockings on them.

Overall, this process was fun from beginning to end. I hadn’t realized how much planning and work went into effectively baking something as simple as cookies, but at no point was this endeavor stressful. It was a relief to focus on doing something or accomplishing a task that wasn’t graded or even assigned in the first place. We were all proud of the final product and happy because baking these cookies was a great way to show our appreciation to the teachers in our lives who have worked so hard and done so much for us. I would definitely recommend that you do something like this for your teachers or for other important people in your life.

My rating out of five stars:

★★★★★

Written by: Ashley George

Thanksgiving is just around the corner! This time of the year always serves as a great opportunity to express our appreciation for what we have and the wonderful people around us. As my family and I have been preparing for Thanksgiving, my mother has discovered a new love of diffusing essential oils. She has many oils that each serve their own purpose and can help people in different ways. After further investigation, I came up with a new idea for this week’s study habit to try out. I wanted to see which essential oils are the best to diffuse for studying to increase productivity and focus.

My plan was to try a different essential oil each day that I worked on school work to see what impact each smell had on my productivity. I was able to borrow my mom’s diffuser and some of her essential oils to see which ones worked best. As I began to research more about the oils, I found that peppermint, rosemary, lemon, ylang-ylang, and eucalyptus are supposed to be the ideal oils to diffuse to increase concentration, focus, and memory. I started out by using the peppermint oil on Monday. To diffuse the oil, I filled the diffuser with water and added a few drops of the essential oil. Then, after plugging in the diffuser, I could immediately smell the cool, refreshing peppermint. When I first started my work for that day, I found that I was getting distracted by the smell of peppermint, since I don’t usually use the diffuser or light candles when I work. After a while, however, I was able to regain my focus and work on studying for my math and biology tests, in addition to planning for a history essay. Overall, I considered this day to be a success, as my focus did seem to increase in response to the peppermint oil. As I continued each day with a different oil, I realized that some of them seemed to work better for me than others. For instance, I didn’t like the smell of eucalyptus oil, so in that case the diffuser was more distracting than it was helpful. The ylang-ylang oil also gave me some issues, but I did end up liking the lemon and rosemary oils.

Overall, I found that this studying habit was successful. There were some smells that I liked better than others, and those oils were the ones that helped me to stay more focused and productive while I was studying. I think that to make this habit more successful, you should experiment and try to see which essential oil works best for you, so that you can stick with what helps you the most.

My rating out of five stars:★★★★☆

Bake It Till You Make It!

Are Essential Oils… Essential?