Exams and Other Things

First off I’d like to apologise for the embarrassing lack of posts, it’s been a very busy month for me.

My biggest excuse the addition to the family! My little sister Ruby was born around 3 weeks ago and let me tell you, she has a really good set of lungs! She could scream the house down if she wanted to! Here she is :) So far I’ve managed to keep away from nappy changing, buuutt I have a feeling I won’t be able to avoid that much longer.

Anyway enough about my family/social life. Why have I been busy you might ask? You don’t have any exams Jayson? Well I did have my maths resit… Smashed it… Obviously… But seriously I was revising every single day for maths so if I fail again I don’t deserve to walk this earth.

It’s not just my maths exam either, nope. The course work is piling up! I mean right now I should be doing a massive line of merits and distinctions, but no I’m here writing this blog *hangs head in shame*. It’s only because I’ve been getting a few emails off of you guys (never going to get used to that by the way) and I kinda miss writing casually like this.

I was thinking, maybe if you guys want me to talk about something, maybe an issue that you have with college that you think I and everyone else could relate to, I could write it for you? I mean I want to make this a little more down deep and personal. So just drop me some suggestions in the comments here, tweet me or just go with what most of you are doing, just email me :)

Twitter - @Jayson__Knott

Revision Problems?

The infamous monster we all know as revision. It takes up our free time, our life, makes us stressed and just generally makes most of not want to do that subject anymore. For me it’s maths revision. I do a GCSE resit in college and it is getting ever so closer to my exam and everyone is encouraging me to revise, I want to revise. But it never happens. Only recently I have actually bit the bullet and just revised. It took a lot of will power though because for some reason I’m not wired to revise.

So why am I talking about this? Well I want to get my three main triggers out there that stop me from revising just in case you have the same ones so that you can learn to avoid or overcome them because after all, revision is what’s going to get you the grade you deserve.

1)   Thinking of better and more entertaining ways to spend my time – this is the classic one. Every time that I say to myself “I better revise tonight” I think about the fact that I want to update my playlist on soundcloud or that I want to watch House of Cards on Netflix (great series by the way). So what I’ve started to do is get my parents to make me revise, and so far it’s working because they can stop me from doing these things because I used to not have enough self-restraint.

2)    Making pathetic excuses – Yet another classic. I always say to myself “I don’t have to revise this, it’s really easy and I’ll remember it anyway” wrong! Take trigonometry for example, I’ll listen and understand it one minute and the next I’ve forgotten how to label the triangle. To counter this I’ve started to think back to this and tell myself that I will forget it and its worth a little time to revise it so it sticks in my head.

3)    Becoming easily distracted – This one was a massive one for me, I could never stop looking at my phone to see what was going on or if there was another YouTube video up for me to watch. Although this was a big issue for me I found that the solution was simple. Turn your phone off.

Now I know what stops me from revising I’ve been revising almost every night now. Instead of going on my phone or Xbox to kill time I revise and I actually feel pretty good after it because I’ve done something productive instead of sitting around and doing meaningless things. My expected grade has gone back up and I’m rarely left confused on a topic in class now. Trust me when I say that this is worth it, nothing is more important to me now than revising.

I hope I haven’t left you guys thinking I’m a complete nerd but yeah that’s what revision is like for me and leave a comment of what your triggers are so others can learn from your mistakes also :)

Tweet me! @Jayson__Knott