Back to reality...

The moment you've been dreading for months has finally arrived...

Summer is over and instead of sleeping until noon everyday; you’re going to be getting up early, wearing an incredibly unfashionable uniform and dealing with the horrors of BACK TO SCHOOL.

How to survive the back to school blues:

• Don’t stress about being popular: it’s about a million times better to have one real friend than lots of people who only like you for your façade.
• Don’t take it out on a teacher just because you can’t stand their living guts and you’d rather eat mammoth poop than spend another second in their class. You have to be there every week, so you might as well learn to tolerate it.
• Keep up with homework; it's always easier than leaving everything ‘till the last minute and cramming.
• Find an escape: drawing, playing football, singing, anything, as long as it’s absolutely nothing to do with your schoolbooks!
• Prepare to hear it for the millionth time: breakfast is the most important meal of the day! Seriously though, it helps your concentration and makes it much easier to not snack on sweets and crisps at break.
• Pick subjects you’re interested in: they’re the ones you’ll do best in.
• Remember not to bottle things up. If you’re feeling frustrated, angry or want-to-kill-the-world-ish, vent it on your pillow or scream it from your lungs, just don’t take it out on yourself by keeping it in.

Smart guide to study

What do you do when there’s a thrumming in your head and any basic thinking seems beyond all capability? That’s what study does to you. Fries the brain cells and turns your frontal lobes into mush. Well it must do. How else can it be that when I’m sitting there, 5 minutes after opening a book I feel like my head’s been draped with a wet tea cloth?

Chemistry, now there’s a subject designed by a cruel, evil mastermind. When am I ever going to want to know the molecular configuration of C5H12 in real life? Sure, I might someday want to explode Uranium but not right now.

And what about the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins? Not so manley in my view if he won’t shut up his whining about how he’s so depressed and blah, blah, blah. So you can see why trying to study can be hard for me. I’m sure it must be for you too – so I’ve put together some tips to help you combat the torture of study:

1. Have music blasting really loud until your mum or dad comes in and demands angrily that you turn it off. Tell them you can’t study without it. Insist this until you hear those sweet words– “Then stop studying!”

2. Draw little pictures at the side of the page of you as a stickman setting fire to your books and dancing around them like some tiny pagan ritualist.

3. Go for many, many tea breaks to break up the time. This works doubly as it means you’ll be on the flusher half the day too.

4. Always have a good supply of magazines to tide you over and that are the right size to hide beneath your Chemistry book.

5. Of course, you could always try to do some actual studying …

By: Miriam Needham

Check out the education section for lots more info!

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