Brandon Learning Centre: British Education - process, preparation and practicalities

Here is a brilliant tip for anyone who is about to sit Common Entrance (or any other exam for that matter!) Reading and making notes will help your remember your information but teaching and explaining your topics will help you even more. In stages... 1: Revise one of your topics (e.g. life processes) and make your notes, 2: Try to teach the topic back to a member of your family. Plan your lesson around providing the information needed to answer typical Common Entrance questions. Refer to the marking scheme when you are thinking of how much information to include. Your aim is to teach the materials and for your student (victim?) to be able to reply to your questions. 3: As you are teaching, remember to repeat key points or share mnemonics (MRS GREN?!) Through teaching your student, you are ensuring that the topic will stick in your mind. 3: At the end of your lesson, if you have explained everything clearly, your students should be able to give you complete answers. You are

Rearrange my pens in size order, wipe my desk, write a "thank you" letter, pay my credit card bill, loaf through Amazon... all things I have done rather than writing a chapter of my thesis. Displacement activities are myriad, I aways think that the less enticing a task is, the more you can justify doing it instead of your work. The old "well I'm not enjoying it so it isn't really wasting time" justification. Ideas: Make a realistic commitment. There is not point saying you will write an entire essay before dinner if you know in your heart of hearts that what you are really going to do is spend half an hour reading a magazine and half an hour in a blind panic meaning that you start writing fifteen minutes before you are set to eat. Break down your task into "chunks" - list each section on a piece of paper. Strike off items on your list as you write. Start at a time you know you can work; I like writing late at night and any work I produce

I can't revise until... I've tidied my desk, sharpened my pencils, made a cup of coffee, rearranged my notes (continue ad infinitum) As Easter revision panic looms, the excuses build up, creating a wall between you and exam success. To misquote The Art of War; know your enemy. Identify whatever you do instead of revising and build it into your revision timetable. In scheduling your prevarication, you avoid running behind time which creates additional panic. Admittedly, a twenty minute block marked "tidy desk" looks less impressive than one marked "advanced mathematics" but this is the reality so name your demons!

Brandon Learning Centre is normally a haven of tranquility in the maelstrom of Causeway Bay. Students discuss literature in measured tones, small children give engaging presentations and even science experiments take place in an atmosphere of studious calm. Not this week though. Oh no. Easter revision is upon us and everywhere we see teenagers frantically leafing through files of notes, prep school boys trying to cram vocabulary into over-stuffed heads and teachers desperately printing revision sheets. So how do you avoid being swept into last minute panic? 1: Plan a timetable allocating time to each subject. Work out how much work you have to cover and allocate periods to each block. Make it realistic; look at the time you have allowed and double it! Build in rest periods and any other activities (tennis?) you know that you will do. There is no point creating a work of fiction! 2: "Chunk" your work. Don't try to cover too much in one session. 3: Test yourself aft