MAYBE BUY:

Sleeping pills

I still have this ‘shopping list’ in my notes app. My sister suggested it to me after I burst out crying at the dinner table, recounting how I could not fall asleep last night and in turn, already discovered many silly mistakes I had made in the exam I just took.  

I have always struggled to sleep before my exams. There’s something ironically cruel about lying in the darkness, trying to find sleep yet failing to despite desperately chasing sleep for the past 2 weeks. My mum would always say “sleep early! Otherwise your brain won’t work”, but it was never that simple. I felt calm, I thought I was calm – but the truth is, you can never really eradicate that creeping terror that awaited you when the lights go out. I had lost faith in myself. 7 marks lost due to silly mistakes in one maths exam, copying the number of moles wrong from my calculator in chemistry, putting the wrong units, accidentally writing a plus instead of a minus – I did not have a good track record. And what was even worse, my brain would not function properly during exams, making mistakes I had never made before, as I had spent the night before floating in and out of consciousness, dreaming of graphs and practise questions and those dotted lines of indicative spacing.

Yet somehow, me, my mum’s ginseng water and ‘Applause’ by Lady Gaga blasting in my earphones found me to rank 5th in Chemistry. And no, I never ended up purchasing melatonin – the sleeping pills (only use medication as directed by your healthcare professional!).

So what changed?

I cared less. It sounds strange, I know, but the less I cared, the better I did. Once I let go of the pointless worrying and started just focusing on understanding content, my marks started improving and silly mistakes became almost extinct. I have learnt the most efficient ways of studying while minimising the pain of staring at a textbook, I have learnt how to stay calm while everyone around me panics, I have learnt how to take something less seriously but still come out on top
– and I would love to share everything I’ve learnt with you!

How can I help you?

Attention to detail – I’ll tell you what teachers look for when marking, I’ll tell you what you need to write to distinguish yourself from others, I’ll make sure you actually understand why rather than
just blind memorisation.

Judgement free zone – my class will always be a safe-space to ask questions, no matter how stupid you think you sound (don’t worry, in year 12 I asked my tutor what ionising means).

Supportive – I know the stinging disappointment of flipping over your exam paper and doing worse than you expected, I know the careless errors that insidiously taunt your mind at night, because ‘if I just hadn’t done that, I would have gotten this’. But I also know the potential there is for a comeback, which students often lose when they give up too early or are thrown off too much by the first obstacle.

Chronically online – feel free to send me any questions throughout the week and I’ll get back to you quickly!