For my history exam I revise by reading and learning the textbook then doing lots of practise questions and getting feedback from my teacher. My history teacher is lovely and I pretty much talk to him like I do with my friends. At my revision session on Friday I spent the whole arguing against what he said I did wrong in my essay but I knew that he was right and he understands my need to argue pointelessly when I'm told I'm wrong. I don't think I've even looked into buying a revision guide for my history course just because the textbook is condensed a lot already, plus I can borrow the textbook for free.
For chemistry I've bought two revision guides and I read the specification, use them and a revision blog someone posted with the specification points on them for revision. I think I must've written about this before because I'm getting deja vu, although that happens a lot even when I've definitely never been there before. Isn't that a sign of early death or hallucinations or something? I also like to ask my teacher questions if I get confused since I find that teachers explain better, which makes sense since they're paid to do it and have a lot more experience etc. My chemistry teacher is lovely, and he was actually my mentor until study leave so I'm fine talking to him. Actually, when I went to see him today he said that I'm like the club scout boy from the movie Up. You know like how he keeps pestering the old man, persistently and repeatedly? This is how comfortable I am around my teacher that he doesn't mind insulting me.
So this is what promopted this post. I was working through my revision guides in the two hours I had before the exam today and a few things about them really started to annoy me. First of all the language in the CGP revision guides. I know a lot of people say that they are really good, love them blah blah and I actually found the Romeo and Juliet summary guide quite helpful in year 8 when I was struggling. But the language is quite informal, I guess to make it more relatable or something, and actually is quite sarcastic and sounds a bit like me. Let's just say I'm starting to understand why people find me annoying and lose interest after I keep talk incessantly for a while. All those little jokes and notes were really starting to grate because I had to waste time reading pointless rubbish when I didn't have any time to spare. Why? Why do that?
Next, this applies more to my other revision guide, it had the exam board logo on it so I think they endorse it or something like that. But generally, I've really liked this exam board's (Edexcel) revision guides but this one for the IGCSE was slightly different to the others I've used. Firstly, the index is severely lacking. A lot of what I would have thought were key words or phrases were not listed which makes finding specific information difficult. Secondly, a lot of calculation examples were not fully explain, like a lot of numbers were put in, seemingly for no reason. That's really not very helpful to me. Thirdly, it seemed like the information wasn't really condesed and they just copied, verbatim, key sentences from the textbook so some passages weren't in enough detail or fully explained. The last thing that annoyed me was that somewhere in one of my revision guides is a definition or more than one, where the definition uses the word that it is defining so you still have no idea what the word means. I've just spent 10 minutes reading through my physics and chemistry glossaries since I seem to have misplaced the biology one. This is bad for two reasons since 1) I have now finished both my chemistry and physics exams completely 2) I have a biology exam on Thursday. I'll give an example, condensation: the condensing of a liquid. Granted, I haven't actually come across something as stupid as that, luckily, but the principle and irritatingness is the same, nonetheless.
The last part of this rant is slightly unrelated but I have no better place to put it but I felt the need to share. I can not be the only one who gets annoyed when to make something, you need a bit of the something you are making. I have two examples: 1) yoghurt. When I made this in biology last year I was so disappointed to find out we needed to put yoghurt in the mixture. What's the point in that? Why not just buy some yoghurt and save yourself the time and effort? 2) the contact process. This makes sulfuric acid (oh, it's really annoyed me that they replaced the 'ph' for 'f', I like 'sulphur', 'sulfur' just reflects the laziness that is the Western World). So you start with sulfur, then burn it in air to make sulfur dioxide then using a catalyst you react it with more oxygen to form sulfur trioxide which is then absorbed into concentrated sulfuric acid, making oleum. This is then mixed with specific quantities of water to make sulfuric acid. This just means that a) oleum is really concentrated sulfuric acid and b) it's like when people drink water then backwash into the drink (ew.). Ok, that's not true since it changes from SO3 to H2S2O7
to H2SO4 but still, it irks me. Wow, blast from the past, my friend and I used to use that word all the time and even my uber genius of brother didn't know what it meant. I'm sure you all really appreciated that impromtu GCSE/A Level (my course apparently contains A Level material) Chemistry lesson there.
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