A student sits in their classroom with work piling up and no motivation to do any work so they just sit on their phone and push the problem to another day. As their GPA rises and their willingness to go to school goes down they start skipping school and fall way behind.
During the middle part of second semester students tend to lose all motivation to do any work as a result grades start to drop and attendance rates lower. MCHS came up with a solution to get students through this rough period of high school. It started at Freshman Campus and has now moved to upper campus. “Beat the Blahs” is an incentive for students to maintain motivation throughout this time.
“At the upper campus it’s called the ‘Orange and Black on Track,’ so they have two separate names,” Director of student activities Mitch Stengel says. “At the Freshman Campus, you have to ‘Beat the Blahs.’”
“Beat the Blahs” and “Orange and Black on Track” is a great way to incentivize students to either maintain their current GPA or grow their GPA.
“There are two separate objectives to each carnival, right?” Stengel says. “’Beat the Blahs ‘is focusing specifically on students’ core GPA, so for example, can you maintain or improve your core GPA in your classes like math, English, science and social science, right over on or at the Upper Campus, we have two different directives.”
While keeping your GPA up is one incentive students are also incentivized to keep coming to school so that anyone with a 90% attendance rate or raise there attendance rate can also go if their GPA does not improve.
“We have anyone that has a 3.0 or higher or improves their GPA gets to attend, and they have to either have 90% attendance or raise their attendance by 2.5% over the course of the duration of the window, right?” says Stengel. “So, and both have different timelines too, right? So, our sBeat the Blahs’ carnival is on March 21 and then at the Freshman Campus, and then our ‘Orange and Black on Track’ is on April 16.”
Sophomore Cayden McLean talks about his experience with “Beat the Blahs” at Freshman Campus and how it helped him.
“Motivated me to try to… just stay in school and not try [not to] call out sick if I didn’t want to go, because … the reward they said there’s gonna be … a huge fair and everything,” McLean says. “That kind of motivated me not to skip or anything. It kind of made me do my homework, because they also had the grade requirement.”
As the student sits in class they now have new found motivation to complete their work. They are encouraged to escape this slump and get their grades up so that they can go to the carnival, which helps the students get through this hardest time of the year.