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Like you, every Year 12 student is time poor. In this article, Matrix Scholarship Student Alan Wong shares how he maximises time by studying smarter, not harder!
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In this article, Matrix Scholarship holder and Sydney Boys High School Student, Alan Wong, explains how to maximise your time by studying smarter, not harder!
Helloooo! I hope you’re having a great day and if not that it’ll get better soon! My name is Alan Wong, now finishing up high school at Sydney Boys High.
I am studying:
There are times when I think about doing Extension 1 and 2 English, but hindsight is 20/20. I’m happy about my subject choices and find them all interesting in their own unique ways although I do prefer the sciences and English above Maths.
During Term 2 of Year 12, I used Matrix+ for all my subjects:
The best thing about Matrix+ is that it’s adaptable.
I’m not going to pretend as if during Term 2, I managed my time perfectly and managed to do every lesson on time. That would be disingenuous, as I definitely fell behind. It definitely helped seeing a teacher’s face as we went through the book.
Sometimes I found it easier to go through the content myself first, and then refer to the video with teacher worked solutions if I couldn’t work out a question. That’s definitely the best part of Matrix+ – the flexibility. It’s also really helpful to have the forum where we can ask questions and receive replies, often as our peers have the same queries.
Sometimes I found it fun and even relaxing just to play the theory video while I did other tasks like cleaning up or organising, kind of like listening to a podcast or music. I found Matrix+ most effective as a complementary tool. It’s always easier to get distracted learning off a computer, so I tried to minimise my use of it, and learn primarily from the book.
Speeding up the video in sections that one already may have covered in class is extremely helpful to save time and focus on the areas where we have weaknesses. Then referring to the recorded Q and A or forum when I had questions worked well. Matrix+ is a very extensive and broad platform, to the point where it may even be too much at times. Of course, that’s not at all a bad thing, it just means we have more options to individualise and tailor the learning to how it best works for us.
Up through HSC Trials, this trend has held:
I’ve performed my best in Chemistry. I would put some of it on my school Chemistry teacher, who consistently provides feedback for homework and practice questions. Her enthusiasm and high standards foster an environment of consistent effort.
However, with schooling disruptions, I’ve found that the vast majority of my Module 7 and 8 knowledge has come from Matrix. Both through the Matrix+ online course, and also through holiday classes at Hurstville (shoutout Mr Kearsey!).
I can distinctly attribute my half-yearly performance in Chemistry (which tested Module 5 and 6), to the January holiday course!
Having the in-class demonstrations of titrations, followed by the practical day at UTS provided me with the kinaesthetic learning to help understand and easily memorise the procedure and potential errors for my school depth study task.
I’ve always performed worse in Mathematics, both Extension 1 and 2.
I think part of it was because my school classroom was more relaxed, and our teacher doesn’t check to see if we’ve done homework, so I often slacked off. This seems like a cop-out, however, our environment plays an extremely important role in our success. Society has ingrained personal responsibility and accountability through perceptions of “hard work” and “effort”.
Sometimes we should recognise how fortunate we are. If the wind had blown differently during scholarship applications then perhaps I wouldn’t be a Matrix scholarship student.
Derek Muller, former Matrix science teacher, and now a well-known public educator recently posted this video to his Youtube channel Veritasium. Take a watch, it’s much better than me trying to explain it. (If you want to read about this in greater depth, Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers is an explanation I’ve found interesting, although not very actionable.)
However, there are many aspects I can attribute to Mathematics. The first, is recognising the gap between expectations and the reality of our situation. I find it extremely difficult to engage with timed exam condition practice papers. Personally, I think the aspect of being timed, having a combination of random questions, makes it feel much more restrictive than actually pondering a difficult maths question.
Honestly?
I’ve improved in my Trials performance, and I can confidently attribute this to the Matrix Trial Prep Course.
Perhaps that sentence sounded like shameless promotion, but genuinely, I found that doing the questions, categorised, and with the proper theory, to be much more helpful and motivating than looking at a mountain of past exam papers.
It’s difficult to find direction with sample papers. Procrastination doesn’t necessarily come from being lazy. We often attribute it to our inherent attributes. Instead, one thing it can come from is not knowing where to start, but often also, where to end. With a large book like the TPC, I was motivated and engaged to use the resource as there’s a clear beginning, but also a clear marker of completion. Basically, all of my Trial HSC preparation was done through the TPC book.
Many students will have neatly written and personalised notes. I tried that for one Friday afternoon before giving up as it was just too much effort and took too much of my time. Here’s the work I did on that day, sure they look kind of nice, but I’ve since added basically nothing to it.
Instead, I’ve simply studied off a combination of the Matrix theory and workbook, rough in-class notes, our school homework book, and whatever other online videos I can find.
During Matrix lessons and homework, I use coloured flags to mark out whatever pages I feel would be useful to review for an exam. The colours don’t mean anything, whatever I feel in the mood for, but generally darker colours indicate something more important. Similarly, our school provided us with a homework book, and as I complete it, I’ll use different coloured pens and highlighters to mark out the spots of difficulty to review before an exam.
When searching Google for topics such as “trends of boiling points” I’ll save the webpage to a Chemistry bookmarks folder.
In the lead up to exams, I wrote theory to memorise onto Post It notes, also scanned onto the Post It app, which I would read while walking to school.
I don’t have a personalised collection of handwritten or hand-typed notes, just these (along with some online videos). Perhaps notes are working for you. But if you find, like I did, that they’re too much work or you find yourself repeating content you already know, then don’t write them. From what I perceive, note writers are in the minority: The rest of us aren’t bothered to write them, and above all, they might just be really boring for you and me. Instead, take the path of least resistance: when you’re already doing work, make sure to save the stuff you need. Just highlight the points and throw on flags as you go, and you’ll magically have a collection of notes to review come exam time!
My initial goal was specific colours for specific purposes, but that’s too difficult and over time, it’s become generalised to lighter colours for less important stuff, and darker colours for the more important stuff.
I personally find Holiday courses really useful for content-heavy subjects which require understanding, like Chemistry or Physics. The main benefit is that you can rush ahead with the course, and work out any explanations beforehand. Often, the Matrix course does a better job covering content than school does, so it gives a really nice foundation off which you can build the rest of your knowledge. It certainly helped me during Trials having attended the TPCs.
Although in general, doing the Holiday course for any subject and then learning it in school basically means you’re covering the content twice, helping you to memorise it. And unlike many other tutoring places, the content isn’t covered so far ahead of time that you completely forget it when you cover it at school. The long term benefit is that you end up memorising a substantial amount of knowledge so when exam time comes around, studying is easier and you’ll know more.
Now I can reflect on the past year, I can offer the following:
I would tell them not to worry too much. If you’re pleased with how you’re doing in Year 11, I don’t see much reason to tell you to change. I would actually suggest focusing LESS on studying, and more on everything else school has to offer.
My most productive, educational and eye-opening experiences have come not from studying, but from coordinating events, meetings in the role as Senior Prefect, exercising and having fun playing basketball or running, or debating in past years.
In fact, I regret dropping Debating in Year 12 due to fears of lack of time.
Partly it was due to the Matrix class schedule. But it’s been the extra-curricular activities where I’ve grown most as a person. And in terms of not having enough time, as I’ve alluded to in my “attention management vs time management” step, if you have stuff on your plate, I’m quite certain you’ll be able to handle it. We often underestimate our abilities to juggle multiple tasks. I’m not saying there’s no such thing as “too much” but what you think of as “too much” most likely isn’t that case.
I almost didn’t go for school Prefect because I wanted the extra time to study. I can confidently say that if I had followed through with that, that would have been the stupidest decision I would have made in the past two years.
I don’t think I, nor any single one of us students are qualified to tell you what you must or mustn’t do. We’re all learning and constantly developing, so here’s the insight’s I’ve gained from my tiny sliver of experience.
I am supposed to suggest only three things, however as you’re probably going to skip straight to this section without reading the text above, I’ve decided to make this a bit of TL;DR for the entire article.
Always sleep early, and get enough of it as well!
I aim for before 10pm, normally…
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Written by Guest Author
We have regular contributions to our blog from our Tutor Team and high performing Matrix Students. Come back regularly for these guest posts to learn their study hacks and insights!
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