Starting from scratch at home

During school, the goal is to retain as much as possible and take good notes. Then, when I reach home, I revise the work during the day, do my homework and maybe get a bit ahead of the class. This is the formula to success for me. Unfortunately, it isn’t so easy to follow.

Daydreaming during class and making shabby notes based on what my backbencher buddies had written in their copies, I barely had anything to show for the eight hours at school. I can blame this on my ADHD but that still doesn’t help me deal with the issue.

The consequence of this would be that I had to start from scratch when I got home. Imagine having to cover 8 hours of work within half the time and also do the homework given, including small breaks. In addition to it being extremely difficult to even cover everything, my attention issues and having to do it faster would leave me with a minimal understanding of the concept.

Take physics. The teacher uses her double lesson (about 2 hours) to cover moments of Inertia and angular momentum from rotational motion. She also does multiple questions on the board that she feels are most important and will definitely put the same type of numerical in the paper. I would come home and have an hour max to cover these topics as I also had 4 other subjects to think about. Watching a video on the concepts or reading the whole chapter section would be impractical, so I would have to read a short summary containing definitions and the formulas so I could move on to do the questions. However, since I didn’t know the types of questions the teacher had specified we had to do, I would have to do all the questions in an exercise, and in a hurry, I would do most of them wrong and have to read the solutions, which didn’t really improve my problem-solving ability.

As a result of this conundrum, I would often have trouble keeping up with the class, and would usually be late with given assignments. Many times, I would even find myself starting to study a topic just a few days before there was a class assessment for it. I managed to do okay in most of them but did poorly a few times too.

My chemistry half-term was the final straw on the camel’s back. I had neglected chemistry earlier as I felt it was easier than math and physics and only started taking it seriously in the days before the exam. I read the textbook for each of the chapters and did all of the given examples. I felt I was prepared and even came back from the paper thinking I had done well. Unfortunately, my prediction was dead wrong and I had just barely passed at 29/70. At this point, I realized that in order to do the chapters properly I had to spend more time on them, not rushing through textbooks and doing very few questions. I believe there was also a chance that I would have failed in my finals had I kept up that work ethic.

Since I would likely be unable to magically switch myself on and start working in class, I tried to build up to it. Firstly, in order to build efficiency for when I worked at home, I would note down headings related to what the teacher was writing on the board, so I would at least know what had been done in detail and what had been skipped when I did the work myself. Additionally, while I still had trouble doing the given questions, I would make sure to write them all down so I could figure out and practice those specific ones at home.

This increased awareness worked wonders for me. I was working more efficiently at home and was also slowly paying more attention at school. This worked wonders for me during my finals.

FINAL PARAGRAPH TO BE WRITTEN ONCE I GET MY FINAL MARKS