Proactivity

As the end of the school year approaches, I have provided posts giving advice on how to help support your review process as you approach those final exams and final few topics of the school year.

Now I would like to challenge you to be PROACTIVE. If you are proactive, you make things happen, instead of waiting for them to happen to you. To be in control of your own learning, your assessments and assignments, and ultimately your future.

Try (if you are not already a proactive person) to approach your teacher with material you do not know and articulate exactly what it is you are confused about / ignorant of (a much maligned word with bad connotations) . I bet that half the time, as you explain what you do not know, you will have that “Ah Ha!!!” moment as the “penny drops” and you realise you have unravelled the issue yourself.

Ask your teacher for the past exam papers they have not provided, the test outline they never got round to sharing. I am confident that the issue was not that the teacher did not want to, but rather they perhaps had forgotten.  Rather than asking you teacher to drip -feed all the material they taught in class over the course of the year, in a 15 minute review session, take it upon yourself to review yourself.

From TED talks, a discussion on “High-Quality ignorance”.

What does real scientific work look like? As neuroscientist Stuart Firestein jokes: It looks a lot less like the scientific method and a lot more like “farting around … in the dark.” In this witty talk, Firestein gets to the heart of science as it is really practiced and suggests that we should value what we don’t know — or “high-quality ignorance” — just as much as what we know. [http://www.ted.com/talks/stuart_firestein_the_pursuit_of_ignorance#]

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