News from Mr Grady
As our Year 13 students will be all too acutely aware, spending your time wisely in Year 13 is not an easy thing to do: In addition to A-Levels and all the “what next?” discussions, this year also contains a host of 18th birthday parties to be fitted in and celebrated.
I’m a September birthday, so my celebrations were very early in Year 13. However, one of my best friends has a birthday in early June. His 18th birthday party (back in 1993!) was the Saturday of the week of his birthday, and on the Tuesday morning I had my A-Level English Poetry exam paper. (Wilfred Owen, The Pardoner’s Tale and William Blake, if you’re interested.)
I revised all day on the Saturday. I also had all day Sunday to revise and no exam on the Monday so another free day of revision. My parents were happy enough that I should go to the party, and it was built into my plan that I would, yet at 5pm I found myself ringing my friend to say that I simply couldn’t go, that I HAD to revise and that I was sorry. To this day, he won’t let me forget that I didn’t go, and to this day I regret not going.
Why didn’t I go? I think it was to avoid the guilt. It was the guilt that when I opened my envelope of results, if it wasn’t what I’d hoped for, that I would blame “the time I went to that party.” I thought that “spending my time” on working was the thing to do, when of course I realise now, that time itself wasn’t the measure I should have been using.
I worked as hard as I could so that I could always say, “Well, I couldn’t have worked any harder.” Which is all well and good – but the revision I did that night, did nothing to make me feel better or more prepared for the exam. It wasn’t on my plan, so I found myself making tasks up that I really wasn’t committed to. It taught me that a really decent revision plan, or indeed any period of work needs to have a carefully balanced range of activities in it. If you simply “revise all the time” you’re measuring the wrong thing!
Is what you’re doing having an impact? Are you building your knowledge base and applying it to more contexts? Can you make more connections between and across different topics? That’s effective revision, not just the time used.
You don’t celebrate an 18th birthday just because 18 years has passed, you celebrate what you’ve done with it, the connections you’ve made and the things you’ve gained along the way. You celebrate the person you’re becoming and toast the person you’re going to be. Time itself isn’t the measure: It’s what you’ve done, what you’re doing and what you’re going to do with it that counts.
With best wishes,
Mr Grady
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