The older a student gets, the more they will be expected to work independently and set their own study habits. Whilst, in primary school and in the early years of high school, students are told exactly what they should be doing with their time, VCE students are expected to set their own study schedules. A lot of VCE students find this terrifying! To them, the task of studying hard in roughly 6 different subjects over the course of 2 years and achieving an ATAR score seems an impossibly huge task. When this happens, students can often become paralysed by the enormity of their task.
“How am I supposed to do all of this?” they often ask.
The metaphor of the mountain is a good way of thinking about this. No matter how strong a person is, there is no way that they could lift an entire mountain. Could you? In a similar sense, no matter how gifted a student is, there is no way they can possibly achieve VCE success overnight. So, how do we move this gigantic VCE mountain?
The answer is simple. We break it up, and do one thing each day.
When you think about it, the larger goal “get a good ATAR score” can easily be broken into hundreds of smaller tasks:
- Update my art folio each week
- Rewrite my notes after each English class
- Finish reading my Literature text
- Write a revision sheet for my Physics SAC
- Ask my Biology teacher to explain photosynthesis to me again
- Make a plan for my Psychology report
- Do another draft of my Legal studies essay
- Revise my Japanese vocabulary words every Monday night…
The list goes on!
The interesting thing about these little tasks is that students often don’t think they make much of a difference. They assume that, because these tasks are small, they won’t make much of a difference to the final result. People are funny like that; we don’t like doing things unless we are rewarded instantly. We are terrible at thinking in the long term. So we say things like…
“I’ll do that later.”
“I’ll study hard closer to my exams.”
“Just one day off won’t hurt.”
“That topic is easy, I don’t really need to study for it.”
But here’s the truth… Listen carefully… Print it out and stick it up above your child’s desk…
It is the small tasks that make large goals achievable.
Successful people are the people who do something small every day.
Every day, your child should ask themselves: “What is one thing I can do today that will get me closer to my goal?” It may not be a huge task, it may not seem vital. The important thing is that each day, they are doing something.
Because over the course of 2 years, small things have a tendency to build up into larger things.
And that is how VCE success happens.
Does your child do something small each day, or do they try to “move a mountain” at the last minute? What are some things that your child can do TODAY to move closer to their goal? Share your experiences with us in the comments!
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