This week’s reflections
Year 12 is nearly done, mocks completed and the long stretch of summer is ahead of you. For most students it feels like a finish line, with no more lessons to think about.
A complete break is exactly what some of you need first, although there’s a real trap in treating the whole summer as a write-off. Year 13 picks up the pace from week one and assumes everything from Year 12 is still fresh in your mind. Starting September feeling calm has very little to do with revising all summer. It comes from never letting the content go completely cold.
The content you learnt this year fades when you stop using it, not when you stop trying. Two months of no contact at all and a lot of it slips out of reach, so the first few weeks of Year 13 get spent recovering ground you already covered rather than moving forward.
A small amount of contact over the summer keeps everything within reach and twenty minutes here and there is enough to stop that fade setting in before you notice. The aim isn’t to revise all summer. It’s to make sure September doesn’t feel like starting from scratch.
On my mind this week
A lot of Year 12 students assume the gaps from this year will sort themselves out in Year 13. They usually don’t. The topics that confused you in May will still confuse you in September unless you actually do something about them and because Year 13 builds directly on Year 12 a shaky foundation only gets worse.
There’s a particular warning for those of you whose school has already started Year 13 content this term. That’s because it falls at the end of the year, when everyone has half switched off and so it rarely gets taken seriously. That content does not disappear over the summer. It comes back in September as assumed knowledge, taught at full pace…and anyone who drifted through it the first time finds themselves behind before the year has properly begun. Go back over it now, whilst it’s still recent, rather than meeting it cold in a few months.
The summer is the only point in two years where you have time and no pressure at the same time. Think about which topics genuinely scared you in exams, which ones you blagged your way through and which ones never quite clicked. Those are your summer project. Not all of it, just a few topics turned from amber to green whilst you actually have the space to do it.
Study tip
Choose one weak topic a week, that’s all.
Spend an hour getting it from confusing to clear
Make a single page of notes you’d actually trust in an exam
Do three or four past questions on it
Move on and don’t look back
One topic a week across the summer leaves most of your weak spots gone by September.
For Parents
The first few weeks of summer should be a proper rest. They have worked hard for it and they need it.
Later in the holiday is when a little structure helps. An hour or two set aside on a couple of days a week is plenty and it works far better as a normal part of the week than as a reaction to a bad report or a looming results day.
If you want to help with the content itself, ask them to explain a topic to you. They don’t need you to know anything. Talking it through out loud shows them quickly what they actually understand and where the gaps are and it tends to feel a lot less like revision than sitting alone with a textbook.
Quote of the week
“Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.”
A summer of doing nothing is still a choice…and not the one that pays off in September.
If you haven’t been to one of my information sessions where I share the details of what’s happening between now and September, you can sign up here:
calendly.com/thealevelclub
Instagram: @thealevelclub
Facebook: Biology by Clare