Why don't I go to school every day?

Is there a problem that you know of, with getting yourself to school? Is there a problem there? Are there any difficulties with your classmates, your teachers or any other person? Are there any difficulties with the work that you have to do there? Are you having any problems with homework, not completing it, for example, or with a particular project - maybe in getting it started? Perhaps the work is too easy or too hard? What about school tests, or maybe school exams or public exams? Are you finding it difficult to study for those? Alternatively, are there problems at home that are on your mind or that mean you feel you have to be at home instead of school?

It's important to think about WHY you may not want to go, because before you can get motivated to attend school, you need to know why you aren't going, or why you don't want to go. Sometimes, the problems are very difficult to identify. We all try to hide away from unpleasantness. Sometimes we do our best to pretend nothing is wrong, even when other people know there is a problem. If your school has a counsellor or pastoral adviser, you may find it helpful to talk to them if you have a difficult problem, or even if you don't know WHY you don't attend. Listening to ourselves talking through a problem can help us find out what it is and perhaps identify ways of overcoming it. Sometimes, the problem is not with school or with anyone else in particular. Some people can suffer from depression, even a deep depression. This means they don't want to do anything or go anywhere at all. In this case, you should see a doctor straight away. There is a lot of help available for depression.

If there is no specific problem at home or with school, or your school work, or the people, and you are not depressed, then maybe school itself is not very interesting to you? Maybe the problem is that the subjects themselves are boring (or some of them anyway) or you haven't been able to get into the class you wanted? Maybe you don't really need to go to school, because you already know everything you need for the job you want to do for the rest of your life?

Think hard about your problems with getting to school and also any good points you can think of and write them down in two lists side-by-side. There are some positive aspects to going to school. Interacting with others through face to face friendships is important, as is learning to distinguish body-language and expressions. Discussion and debate with your peer group is important in developing your own thoughts on life, your own value system and testing out friendships and relationships of many kinds, some, or many, of which may last your whole life. Another important positive benefit in going to school is that physical exercise is normally included. Now not everyone agrees in that being positive! But exercise helps you learn, as well as teaches you co-operation with others and helps keep you fit and healthy. These aspects can all be found elsewhere, besides school but that often means making a deliberate effort to seek out opportunities which could already be part of everyday school life. Of course, the downside of school can be having to attend lessons you don't like, find out about subjects you don't understand and even mix with people you don't like.

Once you have considered all the good and bad points and made out your lists of positive and negative points about school, look and see which list is longer. If you check out which list is longer and find that there are more bad points than good about going to school, then it is not surprising that you are not motivated to attend. Are there any of the bad points about school that you could change? If you can turn those into good points and make the good list longer than the bad list, you'll find that it is MUCH easier to get up and go to school than it was before.

Turning round a negative aspect to a positive one usually involves action of some kind but we often find it difficult to make the changes in our behaviour and lifestyle that we should because the pain of change is here and now, while the promised future reward seems like pie in the sky. In order to change, you need to work towards a goal. It also means taking action to reach that goal. This needs to be something concrete, such as improving school attendance. If your attendance record is not good, you could make your goal to be to improve that by a certain amount. For instance if you have only attended school for 50% of last term, your goal might be to attend for 75% (three quarters) of the time next term. Alternatively, your goal might be to achieve a pass mark in all your exams, or to submit 100% of all required coursework.

Achieving your goal means really wanting it and going for it. Just like in football, you keep your eye on the ball, as well as where you want it to go and do your best to get it there. And it really doesn't matter if you fall a few times along the way as long as you just get right back up and start straight back in.

It is important, however, to make sure that the goal you have decided to go for is actually possible. It may be a difficult one to reach but it has to be possible, otherwise you won't start. Now divide your goal up into steps. If you think of it as a journey, you might say that it will take you a month to reach your goal, so what do you have to do each week to reach that and then what step must you take each day to make your weekly goal? For some people, a really big goal might be to run a marathon and to just consider running one might seem impossible at present. But by breaking it up into small manageable goals, such as running 500 metres or one kilometre and improving from there, you can eventually reach the goal. Maybe your goal is to improve your study skills or your exam marks. You might set a goal of learning one new study skill a week and spending 10 minutes a day using that skill. It doesn't seem like a whole lot of time, does it? But it will make a noticeable difference very quickly. If you want to improve your people skills, you could join a club and set a goal of attending weekly and taking part in something. If you already belong to a club, you might set a goal of doing some work in the club, such as organising an event.