Homeschooling Made Me a Better Student
Here are some of the most important lessons I learned from that time.
Nearly all students were sent home in the spring of last year. Some are back at school and some are still studying from their desks and attending classes over zoom and MS Teams.
The last year has been hard on a lot of students. Without the daily guidance of teachers, we were all responsible for learning on our own. A great deal of discipline was needed and not all people already have that at what is for some a very young age, especially in the age of phones, notifications and social media.
For me, it was a bit rocky in the beginning but after a while I managed to get the hang of it. I learned a lot about myself. I managed to stay disciplined and thus was able to turn that time into some of the most interesting months in terms of growth, studying and productivity. In this article, I am going to share a few lessons and how they turned me into a better student.
The power of todo-lists
This is not just something for CEOs, corporate workers and productivity YouTubers. They are an extremely powerful tool for studying more effectively and actually getting something done.
I started by hanging a large whiteboard above my desk. On it, I made a todo-list every Sunday with general and broader goals and tasks for the week and one every morning with everything I needed to achieve until that evening. I also wrote down the days with online classes and listed all of the material I would need. This way I was always prepared and ready to take notes and learn as best as I could, given the situation.
Proper time management
During the time of homeschooling, a lot of our learning and studying was being done on our own time and at our own pace. It was extremely easy to fall behind, get lost in the phone or just do some work that barely scraped the surface. I had to use trial and error, but after a while, I could plan my day well and get everything done. This way, when school started again, I was able to use the same principles and become more effective in my studying. Thanks to this, I have never had a semester with better exam results. All of these tips are too much to put into this article and I will sum them up in another but here’s a little summary:
- Plan a specific block of time for each subject, no more
- Plan breaks in between
- Prepare 15 mins before a lesson
- 1 hour of fully focused study in the evening on the hardest subjects
I now use some of these and a few more in my normal school day and after school. It’s funny that such subtle changes can have such a large effect on performance. I can only encourage you to try these.
The importance of staying in touch
We’re all used to seeing each other nearly every day of every week but with homeschooling, this is barely the case. Right from the get-go a couple of my friends and I kept in touch every day inside of a discord server. This way it was pretty much like a normal school day and no one was all alone in their room.
This is an extremely important tip because being completely alone for a prolonged period is just not good for most people, you need to keep in touch with your circle of friends to make it through.
Summarizing directly after class
Usually, I would wait with revision until a couple of weeks before the exam but during homeschooling, I had a tremendous amount of time on my hands. This led to me condensing and trying to understand the new material on the day of learning it so, come exam period, I wouldn’t have to dig out the relevant information anymore. This way I could get straight to revising the important stuff. Writing everything down condensed and in my own words also helped with understanding the learned material and ultimately led to me memorizing it better.
Bye bye phone
I learned very quickly that the phone had no place near my workspace during school or studying. This made sure that I wouldn’t be distracted by social media and that I could purely focus on the job at hand. I really recommend this to anyone that has trouble with staying on one task for a longer period of time or someone who, like me, procrastinates easily.
So to summarise, here are some bullet points of the tips mentioned above:
- Write daily and weekly todo lists
- Manage your time appropriately with breaks and preparation blocks
- Don’t go at it alone
- Fixate the material right after class or at the latest in the evening
- Remove the phone from your workplace
Now there are many more tips I could give you but for the sake of simplicity and readability, I focused on the most important ones.
If you have any other good tips for students, especially in homeschooling, comment them or write me a DM on Twitter and if I get enough, I’ll compile an updated list for you!
