A lot of folk had a really rough time during the isolation and sudden change of life style that came from the Covid pandemic. It could be especially hard for young people trying to engage with distance learning. For a teenager, distance learning in one form another lasted more than a tenth of their life! Over 10 per cent of their lived experience was isolation, chaos, and confusion during a time of critical development.

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Josh was working as a public high school teacher during the Covid pandemic. His school district instructed him to put the social and emotional wellbeing of his students first. So, he chose to teach the 13 virtues (under the name "character excellence") as part of his curriculum.

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Students loved it! Here are some of their anonymous reports on how the principles presented on this site helped them grow:

• Learning about Excellence has helped me become more aware of the ways I behave and what things I can focus on to become a better person.

• Thinking about how you feel is always a helpful thing and excellence often makes you think about how you feel, and just the feelings you want to think about.

• I am aware I am privileged and lucky to live the life that I still don’t really realise just how lucky I am.

• Learning about Excellence has allowed me to focus on myself in a new way. I can visualise myself as an improved person and am able to identify which changes and shifts I need to make to get there.

• As I read over my excellence journal, I noticed that I talk a lot about identity. I think this is an important time for me as I begin to prepare to be my own person and make important decisions for my future. I am excited to get to know myself better and to learn through my challenges and experiences.

• I will say he helpt me not to keep all my feelings inside and express them in a doc that he cant see 

• i dont feel like i have a burden no more i have something to tell my feelings too and have no back lash

• I would say that it has helped me communicate with my family better and that it has helped me get my point across 

• I think something that helped me a lot was just believing in myself. Just telling myself that I can do it and believe that I can do anything if I put my mind to it.

• I would say that it has assisted me in looking into actually good character traits, and understanding how they can help in situations. It’s one thing to say, oh yeah Communication is a good trait, but it’s different to actually think about how it can help.

• It helped me because it made me think of ways I can be more excellent like in excellent communication. It helped me be more honest, sensitive, and effective. 

• A lot stood out to me but what did is that it helps me express my emotions and makes me feel much better about who I am.

• it makes me happy learning about excellence. 

• I’d tell them that it helps me learn more about myself and how my actions can affect others and myself. I realized that I have a lot more to say about certain subjects and topics in my life than I thought I did

• So what I learned about excellence and mr. Wagner's class is that there's so many different meanings to it.It just helps me to see a better perspective in my life and just like notice the little things. I answered the excellent journals truthfully I say what I'm thinking or if I'm confused I'll tell them that I don't get it or I just don't know what to say .

• It helped me by realizing what to do in my future and how to treat others with kindness and respect and how to better myself to improve my future.

• That the more that I write and the more prompts I write about, the longer that my answers get.

• I would tell them that learning about excellences has been a good way to deconstruct my problems and will help to build a path to solutions

• It’s helped me set my priorities and goals straight. I never thought about how exactly I should improve myself but sitting down and writing about it has made me see my goals in a bigger view and perspective. Something that stood out to me was that I’ve been making myself happy all this time but I’ve forgotten about the people around me. But now that I’ve grown healthier with myself I can show the same to my family and friends.

• I would tell them how it has helped me think better. I think I am really conscious of my actions now and how to deal with them.

• I realize that I don't really do a lot of things. Put in my Excellent Journal want to know that I'm going to start making a goal To start doing some of They're really a valuable lesson to learn and I think that Excellence just brings some goodness and Because I feel like that I never really understood people when they you're going through stuff then I'm going to start listening and I know people can be mean sometimes but you never know what they're going through at home at school with friends with boyfriend so I feel like you just need to understand and Excellence definitely helps me with that .

• We haven’t been doing it for too long, only about two weeks now, but it’s actually helped me a lot. I knew exactly what I wanted to learn about the first day we started the Excellence journals, and I looked through all of the prompts until I could find it. It’s crazy to me, how much my mindset has changed about that topic of excellence in the past couple of weeks. I’m proud of my progress.

• The thing that stood out to me the most, is how much I’m actually taking from it. I don’t know if I can credit it all to Excellence, but definitely a good part. I’ve seen some dramatic changes in myself in the past couple of weeks. There’s still been some pretty dramatic lows, but along with that has been some really dramatic ups, and that’s really good progress from where I started.

• I would tell my friend that I have become a better listener because of my excellence journal. I would also tell them that it has helped me try and improve some of my qualities as an individual.
  I feel that what stood out to me in my excellence journal was the fact that there are so many different and unique ways to show one's excellence.

• It helps in helping or solving problems in most situations. For me the excellence of mindedness helps me on getting my assignments done before it piled up. 

• What stood out for me was that excellence can be implemented into almost anything, any problem that you have excellence can help you.

• It helped me understand different ways to improve myself. I thought there was no solution to my shyness but learning Excellence and reflecting on the topics help me realize why it’s important to improve my communication skills and how it could benefit me.

• Learning and writing about Excellence has helped me to express my feelings and made me think of some stuff.I really enjoy doing it, you should try it.

• I mainly write about motivation and it has helped me a lot in completing stuff that I need to do.

• Learning about Excellence in Mr.Wagner’s class has made me more aware of my responses to certain situations and how I would react, it also made me think more about what can I do to be a better person. 

• As Ive read my Excellence journal I realized that having motivation is something very important to me, and if I don’t have the motivation I won’t do anything which leaves me with 20+ homework assignments missing that I have to do when I do have motivation. 

• When i wrote about my girlfriend it helped me figure out what needed to be fixed the most

• Yes it has significantly helped me, i've learned which areas i need to work on and other tips for dealing with certain situations.

• It stood out to me that a lot of what I wrote about involved talking with others and improving the way I do so. I wrote about those things in nearly every entry because it is a personal goal of mine to talk more to other people and to try and combat my anxiety around it. I am working hard to overcome my fears of people and making friends. 

• I would say its helped he with time management, allowed me to know what to start school work with.

• It's helped me learn more about what i can do to have a productive day, week, month, year. Overall, being able to change my lifestyle in a more positive way. 

• What stood out to me was that I've continued to become more motivated, instead of pushing things away and trying to do things at a later time, which I used to forget about and never do.

•  it has helped me to ask questions to my teachers when I need help. 

• I now tend to give the benefit of the doubt because I don’t know what they’ve got going on in their life

• It help me to stay motivated everyday to do homework or going outside for a walk

• Definitely being more of myself, and not beating around the bush during situations i don’t like.
  I have seen myself grow more this past year than I ever have for all four years in highschool.