I’m just about to take my GCSE’s, and everything is going fine. I’m not revising any less than anyone else at school (despite what my mum and dad keep trying to tell me). Yet my mum keeps going on at me about how she had to revise for five hours a night, seven days a week, etc, etc. It’s not my fault she needed to revise absolutely everything. She should have just paid more attention in class.
And my dad’s the same. He goes on and on for hours about how I’m going to fail all of my exams, and how he thinks that all of my friends are currently revising more than I am. To be honest, I’m so bored with his moaning that I take no notice anymore. I mean, if it was maybe once or twice a week, his minor objections to my “attitude to work” would be bearable. But once or twice a day…are you having a laugh? If I fail my exams, it will be entirely down to his negative attitude distracting me and pulling me down. The situation is now no longer in my own hands.
It’s a fact of life: REVISION IS BORING. So why my parents try to get me to do it all the time is something I will probably never know. I do what I need to do, I fill in the gaps in my knowledge. All my parents are trying to do is inflict pointless hours of page-flicking and formula learning upon me. If they wanted to do that when they were younger, then fine. But this is the 21st century, and you only work when it is absolutely necessary.
So how am I revising for my GCSE’s? Well, I look at the lessons that I’ve had on a particular day, and if I’ve struggled with something in class, I study it at home until I understand it. Easy. But mum doesn’t seem to see the easy side of it: “you’ll leave something out”, and “you should be doing more work than that” are phrases that I have just learned to accept. The only reason mum and dad keep having a go at me is that they’re jealous that they were forced by their parents to revise until they were brain-dead, whereas I actually have a social life and so only revise what I actually need to.