Everyone gets sick, it’s inevitable. The biggest problem after being sick for most students is making up missed school work. As someone who goes through this pretty regularly, I’d like to provide some of the best tips for making up your work after being sick. After all, it doesn’t have to be as hard as you make it. You just have to manage your time well and prioritize.

First and foremost, communicate with your teachers. The communication barrier between a student and a teacher can be one of the hardest things to overcome. The best way to overcome this is to be proactive and not reactive. Go to your teacher during lunch, before school starts, or after class, explain your absence, get your work, and turn it in as soon as possible. Most teachers are very understanding and have no problem with giving you time extensions, and help with classwork. Don’t wait for the teacher to come to you; most of the time they won’t. It’s up to you to be responsible for your own grade and classwork.

Perhaps the most important part of making up work after an absence is not procrastinating and staying organized. SMCPS has the 5-day policy after an excused absence for students to be able to get their work completed. The worst thing anyone can do is to wait until the last possible day to do all of their work. You may not do the best you can on your work and may get a poor grade for the assignment, The second issue is that you can’t really absorb the material as you’re supposed to because you tried to cram it all in a short period of time. The bigger issue there is that if that information is needed for future tests or quizzes, you won’t have the proper information to do well on the test.

All in all, the best way to prevent having make up work to do is to stay as healthy as possible and come to school. Another big idea is to ask your friends or your teachers for help on a specific topic you may not understand after being absent. If all else fails, try your best to follow these tips and hopefully you will recover well.