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Term Three Academics

6 April 2015
Toby CH, Privett ‘15
It’s June 12th, the day before your first exam. Shoving up the sleeves, cuff to elbow, you stare in exasperation at question number eleven. There’s no way you can do it; heck there’s no way you’ll pass this final exam. You didn’t listen in class and now you can’t do this – where is your calculator?  That dream you had last week of acing your final seemed to be an evanescent glimmer at the time, you thought it might have been prophetic. It wasn’t. Your life is a living nightmare. As dejected as a whale in an aquarium, you slump heavily into your desk chair, knowing that now mostly it would be the worst of times.  Your sorrow turns to rage and your rage bubbles over, and you shortsightedly choose to slam your right hand down on your desk, forgetting that you put your chipped pottery bowl down there. Hairline fractures spread across your pinky and the jagged chunk out of the lip of the bowl rips open the skin between your thumb and pointer finger. As small droplets of blood begin to pool around your wrist you say out loud, “I knew it. I knew I could have studied harder.” Do you want to avoid this happening to you? It’s fairly easy, in fact, it’s just four simple steps. Step One] Drop out of pottery. Step Two] Save and organize your old tests and worksheets. The teachers here at Brentwood are smart folk, and they will have given you tests with particular questions for a reason. Discover this reason and memorize it; unit tests are especially useful to go over thoroughly two or even three times, just to make sure you know your stuff for when exam time rolls around on its giant, scary wheels. Step Three] Use time to study outside of prep time. As hard as it may be to sneak away to the library as the days begin to brighten, shelving one hour of study time during an arts block or even a hard fifty minutes of work on your spare can prove to be much more useful than losing at Chel to your roommate, again. Difficult exams call for difficult decisions of when to study, and you have to be prepared to make those. Step Four] Ask your teachers questions. Brentwood is proud to maintain safe classroom environments schoolwide, and if you ever have a question, I believe it is imperative that you ask your teacher immediately. Be conscientious about collecting correct answers to study for later. Many teachers are even generous enough to offer extra help sessions out of their own time, and I highly suggest you take them up on that. Use your teachers as the resources they are. There you have it, reader. Follow these four steps and you’ll find yourself ascending to new heights and grade percentages you only thought existed in those moving pictures. Term three is the most enjoyable one yet, and I am positive you will have a great time. Toby CH, Privett ‘15, Winner of a big bag of mini eggs as an anniversary present.

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