Rocked up a whole year early and learned something big!
I have a confession to make.
Last week, I turned up at Tamatea High School, well prepared and ready for their expo, only to find there were no stalls, no visitors, no expo at all. There were exams.
I stood outside the hall slowly realising I had the date wrong. Not by a day. By a year. The expo is the 8th of September 2027. Well prepared indeed.
But standing there feeling like a right numpty, my attention turned to the students inside that hall.
I remember approaching exam days myself with huge dread. I had studied hard, but I never knew what I would actually be able to pull out of the hat when the moment came to write an answer.
I knew what I wanted to say. I just could not get it onto the page in any coherent way.
Sometimes I would misread the question, or worse, not understand it at all, and end up writing something just to fill the white void on the page, hoping that somewhere in amongst my waffle there might be a mark hiding.
The more stressed I got, the worse my handwriting became, and the further away the answer felt.
And here is the thing that still happens to me now. I read something on the page, get to the end, and have to shake my head because nothing stayed in my brain. So back I go to read it again.
Students these days do a lot of their exams on laptops, which certainly solves the handwriting problem. But it does nothing for the "I know what I want to say but I cannot get it out" moment, or the "I read that whole paragraph and none of it stuck" moment.
Those are the real problems. And they are not solved by concentrating harder!
So if you have a young person heading into exams who knows their stuff but freezes on the page, here are a few things that genuinely help.
When nothing stays in your brain, stop pushing through
The instinct is to keep going and hope it clicks. It won't. Instead, stop. Close your eyes, take a slow deep breath, reset, and then reread. That small pause does more than another three rushed read throughs ever will.
Use a line guide
On a paper exam this is as simple as picking up a blank sheet and sliding it down the page, reading one line at a time. On a laptop, most have a line guide or focus tool built in, so use it if it is there. Read one sentence, stop, breathe, read the next. If that is too slow for you, take it one paragraph at a time and check you actually understand it before moving on.
Catch the answer before it scrambles
For the blank page moment, jot the key points down first in any order, just a quick brain dump before writing the full answer. Get the ideas out of your head and onto the page while you still have them, then shape them into sentences.
It feels slower. It is not. It is far better to spend the time getting it right than to race ahead, miss the point, and hand in a vague answer that never says what you actually knew.
If you are watching a young person struggle with exactly this, or you want to understand what is really going on for them, my From Confusion to Clarity workshop walks you through it.
→ 7.00pm, Wednesday 23rd September
→ Online via Zoom
→ Only $39.00 + GST.
Register here
It would be great to have you along.
