It’s now more than ten years since I graduated from high school, and I’ve been reflecting a bit about my journey and the support I had when I was a student. There are a few really key things that my family did to help me get through what can be a pretty stressful period.
I’m not saying these are things you have to do to support your child, of course, and I should also reiterate that every single student will study differently and have different preferences. These three things really helped me, however!
Providing the space to study
I appreciate that each student will have different living arrangements, and having a dedicated study space at home won’t be possible in a lot of cases. But what I’m talking about here is actually less physical.
I actually didn’t study at home all that much - I preferred studying at school as much as I could - but when I did study at home, I really appreciated it when my family would respect that I was trying to study. To facilitate this, I would try to be transparent about my study plans - “hey, I’m planning to do [task], and then at [time] I’m going to try to study for [duration]”, and my family would kindly do their best to acknowledge that and limit noise etc.
I don’t like the feeling of putting people out, so I never expected people to change their plans or anything like that to facilitate a nicer study environment, but even small things like closing doors and speaking a little more quietly really went a long way, and were very much appreciated.
Offering services as a sounding board
A lot of the time, I was a bit of an anxious ball of energy, and either just wanted somebody to listen to what was happening at the time, or help me study by letting me speak.
I’m not sure if this is a common thing for high school students, but I found that talking through my schedule sometimes made me feel a bit more relaxed, in the same way that writing down things you have to do can help you compartmentalise that information. For example, I might say to my family, “okay - I have two tests tomorrow, then I have to get homework in on that Friday, and then I’ve got a bit of a break until the next exam block”. I didn’t expect them to take a huge interest or even necessarily listen, but letting me speak in this way was really helpful for my internal organisation.
I also used a similar strategy for remembering content. Some of my subjects were fairly content-heavy - so lots of definitions and theoretical concepts to remember - and I often found myself writing summary notes to try to remember everything. But I also found that once that was done, it was actually quite difficult to know whether I knew the information, or if I’d simply written it down passively.
To test this, I’d give the notes to a family member, and ask them to test me on any given section. Sometimes, I’d just ask them to say a word and get me to elaborate on that word as much as I could. Because they hadn’t studied the subject, I knew they probably wouldn’t be able to easily check for content accuracy, but that wasn’t the point - being tested in this way gave me an indication of what I felt confident on, and which areas needed more development. I’d use this as a sort of formative assessment to help guide me in my future study.
I really appreciated the time my family members gave to help me do this. Realistically, you could probably do the above on your own - set yourself up in front of a mirror, look at a word or concept, then try to elaborate etc. - but I found the motivation was much higher when there was somebody else there with you.
Supporting my interests
This was probably the biggest one, thinking about it. Through high school subject selection and then also through university course selection, my family was really supportive of what I wanted to do, even though a lot of my preferences ended up requiring lower ATARs than what I received.
Year 12 can be a really stressful time. There’s a lot of uncertainty, and I also found that I was putting way more pressure on myself than what I had in previous years. I’m thankful that I didn’t have further pressure coming from external sources about what I should be doing; I was able to research for myself, take into account other people’s thoughts, and then make my own decisions about my pathway - and that really set me up well.
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