Clarity

Clarity

You might have heard the advice, “Work harder, practise more, listen attentively to lecture….” What i’m going to share is mindblowing.

All those advice is good but diligence without clarity is nuts!

I’m going to give a sports analogy. Soccer – Most teams will have the manager or coach give them a strategy briefing on how to play the game against the opposing team before the actual match. Why? Isn’t more practise and training enough? Strikers know how to score, defenders know how to defend, midfielders know how to tackle and get possession. Goalkeeper just keep the ball out of the net.

Of course not, soccer is a team game. The players need to know the objective so that they know how they should play. For example, if the opposing team is playing on their home ground, they have the advantage. Also does the team just need a draw rather than a win? Knowing the objective informs the strategy on how to play the game.

For students studying for O or A level Chemistry, or any other subjects, there is a clear objective laid out before every topic. But it seems like no student ever reads those.

Without clarity on what they will be tested on, how will they know the strategy to employ?

Students like to complain that their notes is so thick, so much information that they don’t know what are the important parts. But they failed to recognise that schools MUST give the context for the concepts that they study, otherwise there’s no head no tail. In the same vein, teachers in school need to teach the whole lecture notes because they must give the context. This is good and necessary.

On the student’s part, they will need to filter out the important information that they need to memorise and structure their answers properly with keywords. Without reading through the learning objectives, most students are lost and overwhelmed by the flood of information.

Thus, tuition comes in. What we try to do is to zoom in on the most important and most tested concepts. Then repeatedly tell the students. Why repeatedly? Because i’ve tried telling them once or twice, even three times. They end up forgetting. Repeating the same concepts in different ways/methods helps students to remember.

This post is on clarity and that is what i hope to impart to my students, clarity on what is important and what is not. With clarity, they can then learn to organise the important knowledge, classify them and easily pull them out from their mental cabinets when required.

Are you clear? 🙂

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Sleep and memory retention

Learning and memory retention

“During sleep, pathways form between nerve cells (neurons) in your brain that help you remember new information you’ve learned. Sleep deprivation leaves your brain exhausted, so it can‘t perform its duties as well. You may also find it more difficult to concentrate or learn new things.” – healthline.com

Guys who go to gym knows the importance of rest days, our physical body needs to rest in order to build up new muscles. If you keep gyming 7 days a week non-stop, pumping iron, without giving your body time to rest, it’s actually detrimental to your body.

In the same way, when you keep studying non-stop, deep into the night, getting less than 6 hours (JC students probably can’t get 9 hrs as recommended!) of sleep daily, this can have a negative effect on your learning and memory retention!

Always have a balance between learning, leisure and rest.

Check out our other blog posts for more tips!

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Circuit Breaker

Circuit Breaker

We are in an unprecedented time. World-wide, many countries have locked down.

Many of us have to stay at home but some have yet to adapt to this lifestyle.

Let’s take a look at some of the things we can do during this Circuit Breaker period so that we come out better.

1. Read a book. This is the time to get down to reading a book. Reading gives us insights from other people’s experiences, remember all leaders are readers.
2. Pick up a new skill. I mean those skills you can learn online. Udemy is a great website that teaches everything from marketing to building a website.
3. Call someone and find out how they have been. Reconnect with friends you have lost contact with.
4. Spend time with loved ones. We spend some much time at home now but if we are not intentional about it, it could well be time wasted! Take pictures, videos, these will become precious memories in time to come.
5. Exercise! This is one of the few reasons you can leave your home for. Get fit. Emerge stronger.

I’m not going to list watching tv and browsing social media because these do not necessarily add value to us.

So there you have it, do upgrade yourself during this period!

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