It's scary time for Year 11 again

If you're in my Year 11 class right now, you'll know that we've just had a grim taste of reality when looking at the calendar and realising there are 8 school weeks left until our exams. Inevitably, as teachers, we then roll out the tired cliches of "it goes by so quick," "you'll wish you'd revised sooner/done more," and "you need to have a sense of urgency now!!"

All of these things are true and in an ideal world you'd all be robotic and be sat in your rooms every night, going over exam questions, comparing yourself to mark schemes, highlighting your weak areas and addressing them with revision. But you're not, you're human and this means you have a social life, other subjects to worry about and pressure coming out of your ears.

So how do you cope?

Simple - Little, effective and often. Make the most of your time and your stress will reduce as you gain confidence and realise you're becoming more and more prepared. 

Apparently, it takes two weeks to form a habit, meaning you stop thinking of ways to get out of something or making up excuses and just get on with it instead, which indeed means there is still time to do the right thing.

Here's what I'd do:

• Set yourself a realistic time to do some revision for each subject. Remembering that your useful attention span is about 20-30 minutes before you become ineffective. How many of these sessions are you really going to fit in a day? Honestly? Pick a number and stick to it.
• Make each session as productive as possible. Are you going to:
  • Do exam questions?
  • Get tested by someone?
  • Try to learn a topic or concept?
• Whichever you decide - stick to the plan. Revise that one topic, do those few exam questions and make sure you learn something from the experience
• Use productive revision techniques, remember my golden rules:
  • Revision is NOT reading your notes or books for half an hour
  • Revision is:
    • Testing your knowledge
    • Identify and write down your weak areas
    • Go away and learn them (read, make notes, do flash cards, mind map)
    • RE-TEST and REPEAT!

The principles are really, really simple. The question is, how motivated are you to take control of your own exam destiny? The bottom line is this, all you need to do is walk out of each exam knowing you did the best you could. This way, you'll be less stressed and confident in doing well. If you know you could've done better, that will stick with you and nag at you for some time. 

Don't waste the wonderful opportunities you have right now.