On The Third Day of Christmas
...That I forgot to post yesterday...So sorry guys! Will y'all forgive me? I was invited last minute to an RPO concert and it was AMAZING! The concertmaster played Vivaldi's 4 seasons sprinkled in between other beautiful baroque pieces, and she played wonderfully. Thank you, Pisanis!
Anyways, an important event took place yesterday: I finished my last midterm yesterday, and now I'm officially on Christmas Break! Technically I have 1 more lab to finish up, but that's pretty easy. But even though I finished my midterms, some of you may not have, or are taking them in January, or don't take them at all. If the latter is the case, then these could still apply to any test. Below, I have some study tips that I have found helpful for my midterms!
1. Quizlet. I cannot even express how useful Quizlet has been for studying Latin. It's super easy, too - you can just put in your terms and definitions, and then they have tons of games and quizzes that you can use to study. It's super fun and super useful!
2. Teach it. Teach a mock lesson to your sibling, dog, or stuffed animals - by repeating the information to another (hopefully without reading the information) you can memorize it faster.
3. Write it down. For a lot of people it is super helpful to write the information down several times until they memorize it. I haven't tried this a lot, but I know some people who use it every time and it works super well.
4. Try setting the information to music. Sometimes learning to memorize a song is easier than learning the information by itself. I have found this particularly useful when memorizing tidbits of information; last year I learned a helping verb song, and this year my Latin teacher has taught us several chants to memorize case endings, conjugations, and even prepositions.
5. Listen to classical music. When I study I like to listen to music; however, listening to pop music is really bad for your focus. Often it is the case that we know the words to the song, and we get caught up in the beat and the words fill our brain instead of the words we're supposed to memorize. Classical music helps me focus more, and I believe that there is quite a lot of research to back me up on that.
I hope those tips help you! Now on to the second part of the post: how the heck do you relax and calm down when you constantly feel that there's something else to do? I, for one, have a terrible time relaxing. I always feel guilty that I'm not doing something, or that there's something else I need to do. I don't know if this happens to anyone else - tell me in the comments if it does to you! So now that you have that day off, how do you relax?
1. Sleep in. I know, it's a given. But I know that sometimes I wake up early, thinking that I need to get up and be somewhere or do something. Sometimes it's impossible to get back to sleep, but sometimes you just need to tell yourself to go back to sleep. This morning I slept in until 11:00 just because I told myself to!
2. Clean a room. If you are still feeling guilty for not doing something, just clean. Then you can trick yourself into feeling exhausted again. Doing something productive that doesn't count as actual work can help you relax a lot better!
3. Go on a run. Exercising will already make you feel better as it is, but it will make you feel productive as well. Knowing that I've done something good for my body always helps me relax. And it also helps that you've tired yourself out, so you don't have any more energy to worry.
4. Look at all your planners. If you're still feeling guilty, check for any assignments that you might have forgotten. Remind yourself that it is break. You have worked towards this all year.
5. Read or write. Pulling yourself into a different world can help distract yourself from the fear of forgetting something. Set your imagination to work instead of yourself.
Those are my tips for studying and relaxing! I hope that they're useful to you guys, and if you have any more tips that you use, tell me in the comments below. Happy studying/break!
