For the past few months, I have been all about “the zone”.
The zone is a flow state that – if you’re lucky – you get into when studying. It’s a place where you think of nothing else but the task in front of you. You’re barely conscious of anything going on around you, because you’re so locked into what you’re doing.
Some of my classmates have different techniques, including one where they study intensely for 20 minutes and break for five.
That doesn’t work for me – I like to stay focused on one topic for longer. I find that it is more efficient and delivers better results. It’s a space I have always been able to access, but I’ve only ever needed to be there for exams.
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It’s now been more than two weeks since our graduation and final day of school and, since then, I’ve had little mental bandwidth to do anything much besides study.
I’ve been putting in five or six hours a day, with the intensity ebbing and flowing.
English paper one finally gave me a chance to put some of this to use. Funny thing about English paper one, though: it’s not really a paper you can study for like other subjects.
Instead, because the focus is on comprehension and writing, it is more of a skills test, and the only real way you can prepare is practice, read and plan.
The paper itself was fairly standard, there was nothing off the wall. Every year, the format is the same, with a choice of three comprehension questions based on a text, and a written section B where we have to respond to a particular prompt, such as “give a talk” or “write a speech”.
As for the personal writing, I always go for the short story, so I responded to the prompt about an ambitious but reckless character that causes a disaster, writing a story set in interwar Italy when communists and fascists battled it out.
Most professional writers would do several drafts of a story to make it perfect. But, for English paper one, I have long since realised that the story doesn’t have to be perfect. We have 10 minutes maximum to plan it, and less than an hour altogether to write it, so I focused on keeping the plot simple and not overly complicated, and focusing on key aspects like descriptive language and characterisation.
The comprehensions were straightforward enough, while I also tackled a reflection about changing your mind and opinions on a topic.
As for the rest of the exams, I got lucky with the spacing, as I have a four-day gap before chemistry, and then another seven-day-gap before applied maths, which is one of the final exams on the timetable.
This will give me plenty of time to prepare. Then, just two days after I finally wrap up, I head to India on a family trip. I will barely have time to catch my breath. But, sure, I’ll have plenty of time to sleep on the plane.
- Shreyash Shukla is a Leaving Cert student at Athlone Community College
