The illusion of having time: Why you should work consistently throughout the year

Before you begin reading this, we would like to internalise one message. Just one message. We are not telling you to work all the time, I repeat, we are NOT telling you to work all the time. We are telling you to work consistently. There is a VERY big difference between working all the time and working consistently. One leads to a mental breakdown with mediocre outcomes and the other comes from a place of equilibrium and balance with successful outcomes. So, one more time: Working consistently DOES NOT EQUATE working all the time. Okay, glad we got that cleared up, you may now proceed.

Unfortunately, when the idea of what a stereotypical student is (at least, in modern times) conjures up ideas of someone looking very stressed in a dimly lit room with a lamp lighting up their textbook as they frantically try to finish their assignment due the next day, with coffee and energy drinks to help them power through. We may have been there at some point in our lives and it’s a horrible feeling. That feeling of dread, that feeling of being stuck, that feeling that you couldn’t even stop working if you wanted to because you have no choice to finish this work. You ponder on what it would’ve been like if you’d done it a week earlier, how much more relaxed you could’ve been right now, all the endless possibilities of the things you could’ve been doing….You get the general gist.

Now this may have been an effective method for you in GCSE’s. Handing in assignments just before the deadline, learning the entire content of your syllabus the night before your test, passively being present in your lessons. I’m afraid that’s not going to work for your A-levels. The worst thing is though that during your A-levels you are going to feel like you have WAY more time than during your GCSE’s. Depending on where you decide to study, you may be allowed to go home when your lessons are finished for the day or if you stay in school you may have a lot of free periods. At first it’s going to feel so great, no one is going to be on your case, you can relax at school, you’ll just be there living your best life. Supposedly.

A-levels are going to test whether you can take control of your studies without being told to. They are going to test whether you can really be an independent learner. And we don’t mean independent learner in the sense to tick off some specification, we mean a real independent learner where no one reminds you that you have homework, no one tells you that you should be reviewing your notes and keeping on top of it. It’s on you. Not all of it, but more than it used to be pre-A-levels.

But it’s okay! So many students have done their A-levels and have come out the other side fine and so can you! Here’s how:

1) Review your notes at the end of every day. This just means go over what you learned in your lessons that day. This might be rewriting your notes in neat and making sure you engage with the content as you write it, so that you can immediately see if there are things that don’t really make sense and that you need to search a little deeper into. Or maybe just do a few textbook questions, or a few revision cards to condense your notes. The reason you should do this is so that once you get to the end of your term/year you won’t be sitting there realising that you have to write up your notes because you’ve already done them!

2) If you can, do your homework the day you get it. During A-Levels as we mentioned you will have a lot of free time that you will be tempted to waste. If you have a free period, just spend that time doing your homework so that you won’t have to think about it for the rest of the week. And even better, it means that once you get home you’ll have more time to relax.

3) Test yourself, do some questions. It’s so tempting to write really aesthetically pleasing notes and convince yourself that you’ve done so much work when really if anyone tested you on the content you spent a while writing you’d be a bit lost for words. This is why you need to test yourself. This is just a way of making sure you actually understand what you are being taught and are not just being a passive learner. Also, making mistakes at this stage is good. It means you’re trying and that early on you already know what bits you have to work on.

4) Summarise your notes on revision cards if possible. This is useful for STEM subjects if you are asked to memorise exact definitions word for word.

As the years have gone by the amount of stress that students are put under due their A-levels seems to be increasing at an alarming rate. Working ahead can help alleviate some of this stress. But don't forget you're not crazy, the stress is real and not self-generated. The amount of pressure on students now is frankly abysmal so we hope that BLOSSOM can help you out.