fear – Beyond The Blonde

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1. For the love of God, STAY CALM!

Everyone will tell you this; your parents, the local priest, all your teachers, and especially your friends. In fact, you may have friends that will brag about how calm they are. Remember, this is a front they’re putting on. Its near impossible to stay perfectly calm before you sit the Leaving – it is kind of a big deal. But don’t let it take over your life. At the end of the day, it’s a long exam over a few weeks in June. Think of it that way, and don’t put the ‘college pressure’ on while your sitting it.

2. Do not, under any circumstances, organise a ‘study group’ with friends.

Harsh but true. Study groups during school hours are okay, and some schools encourage students to study in groups during free periods. But a group with anymore than three people will end in a gossip session about who wore what, or how last weekends rugby game went. It’s even less productive when its a group of close friends. If you do set up a study group, pick two different topics to cover over 90 minutes and take short breaks.

3. Limit your procrastination.

Procrastinating over study will be a problem in your academic life forevermore. And if you can find a way to avoid it, please let the rest of the world know! It’s pointless advising you not to procrastinate, so why not procrastinate in a productive manner? If you want to go shopping for something, make a list of household or personal items you need, and time yourself to see how fast you can get around the shop or department store. Maybe a good use of procrastination time would be to clean out your room or wash the family pet? Again, limit your time. Even organising subject notes is a good use of procrastination!

4. Eat well.

Study fuel is key during Leaving Cert season. Fresh fruits, cereal, flavoured milk and smoothies are all study favourites, and for the most part they can be healthy too. The key to study fuel is twofold; it must be tasty and it should be healthy and energising. Avoid heavy meals and foods that encourage bloating like bread or a greasy bag of chips until after an exam. You don’t want to be sitting in the hall trying to write about Shakespeare and growing a food baby at the same time!

5. Schedule some nap time.

There’s only so much study fuel you can consume during the weeks long study regime before you’ll start to burn out, so don’t forget to set aside some nap time during study time too. The most productive naps are the ones that last between 10 and 20 minutes, so you can stay fresh and alert without getting too sleepy.

6. Make up rhymes to remember tricky formulas or theorems.

This is a great way to remember phrases or formulas for your Science, Maths or English papers. The best thing to do is try and make a rhyme out of a short phrase, or better yet even sing information along to your favourite songs. For example, if you want to remember the stages of mitosis, the phrase ‘I Party Monday And Tuesday’ is handy – Interphase, Prophase, Metaphase, Anaphase, Telophase. You’ll be rhyming and learning in no time!

7. Buy two of everything.

Stocking up on study supplies is crucial for surviving the Leaving Cert. Past Leaving Certee’s will tell you numerous stories about how they ran out of ink or how their calculator battery died half-way through an exam. So make sure to have a well stocked pencil case, the Noah’s Arc of pencil cases if you will. Two biro’s of each colour, two pencils, two erasers, two rulers, two compasses, and two calculators.

8. Make plenty of flash cards.

Well-written flashcards are the saviour of any crammer in the run up to an exam. Most people will use them to remember key points in all subjects, but a hidden trick is to devote some cards to themes you know will come up, and themes you can’t always remember correctly. They will come in handy for younger siblings studying after you too, which earn you major brownie points with the parents.

9. Pack your bag the night before.

This advice from the mouth of Irish Mammy’s all across the country, but to give them their due, its true. There’s nothing worse than the mad rush the morning of a maths exam when you’re trying to find your pencil case or a calculator. They were both on the table the night before and have now vanished – are there Borrower’s living in the house?!

10. Be kind to yourself

Goes without saying really, doesn’t it? You’re doing your best, be proud of it!

And remember…..

All this advice applies to studying when you’re in third level too!!

Flash back to the end of August. I’d had a pretty jam-packed summer; trips to Dunmore East, Liverpool and Inis Mór. And now I was settling down to start my masters in Government, back in UCC. So I’m out shopping for the typical college stuff (pens, papers, highlighters) when I get a phone call. Its from the Irish Guide Dogs Centre and they’ve found a place for me on one of their Independent Living Courses. The course is taking place for the entire following week so I accept my place, pack a bag, and take all kinds of gear with me as its a residential course. Sounds like I did it without even a second thought, doesn’t it? Except there was a second thought, plenty of second thoughts.

Sometimes, I find it really intimidating to partake in some of the workshops/sessions/fun-days that are run for people like me with vision loss or blindness. I find some courses to be a total box ticking exercise – its a case of “ah sure we’ll run that course now and we’ll be done then for the year”. Depending on the organisation of some courses, you can go in waiting to feel empowered and then come out totally deflated. This was definitely a fear I had and kept thinking about all the way out to the Guide Dogs Centre in Ballincollig. I had all these reasons in my head why I didn’t need to go/why I shouldn’t go:

– I manage grand at home, I can do some things

– I don’t really need help from anyone else, I can sort it myself, why does everyone think I need heaps of help?

– If this is a box ticker in any way, I’m high tailing it out the door.

Well, what a surprise I got!

Arriving on a Monday, I was given most of the day to settle in and meet the others in the group, as well as the course instructors and the other staff. Together, we all got a tour of the building, and got to grips with the facilities that were there for us to use during our stay. Then one of our instructors explained the structure of the week to us, which basically consisted of us learning during the day, and making our own fun at night. The course was open for us to do what we wanted with it. So as a group, we all came to a consensus about what we wanted to cook for lunch and dinner that week, made a list of what ingredients we needed, and decided on some extra household related things we wanted to learn too. So we decided on smoothies, lasagne, casserole, curry, wraps, pittas, banoffee pie, and brownies.

Now, the whole point isn’t to learn how to make these specific foods, its really to equip us with skills we can use to make all kinds of meals for ourselves, and by extension of that, to make ourselves more independent in a safe way. We learned how to use our other senses to tell how well our food was cooked (sound, smell, touch), what foods or sauces we were using (smell, touch), how to layer foods (touch, sound), how to use particular appliances safely (touch, sound), and how to make sure our area was clean after we’d cooked without necessarily using sight.

While we did have our instructors with us the whole time we were in the kitchen, it was still a case of “you must cook this – no one else will cook it for you”. And that is exactly the kind of Independent Living Course someone like me needs. Its about empowering ME to do something and finish a job MY WAY, no matter how different it is as long as its safe. It is so daunting at my age to realise that in the next year to three years, I’ll be living on my own, cooking on my own, cleaning on my own. And its daunting because I’ll be the one in charge of me, I won’t always have my parents or my brother to fall back on. And I know they must wonder about it, as do I, thinking “Will she manage? Will she cope?”. So for me. getting these kind of skills was massively important. It doesn’t just benefit me, it benefits those around me too.

Pride is a good thing. But pride could have put a stop to me going out to the centre and learning all these fantastic, new, and badly needed skills. Pride could have stopped me meeting new friends and us all sharing our experiences with one another. I’m so glad I took that particular leap of faith and didn’t let my hesitation or previous experiences stop me – I would have lost out on so much. I can’t speak highly enough of the training and empowerment I got from this course, words could never describe it well enough It taught me a lot about not letting pride stand in my way too.

If you would like to support the work of the Irish Guide Dogs For The Blind, or want to find out more about their services, please click here where you can donate through their webpage or search through the different types of courses run.

Tag: fear

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