This is likely to be most relevant to those writing essay-based subjects, particularly English. It is not an exhaustive list, just a selection of thoughts that I tend to share with students at the start of their time in Sixth Form. I hope that it proves useful.
1. Broaden your active vocabulary.
I once taught a student who, on encountering an unfamiliar word, would always ask me for an example of 'how to use it in a sentence', a habit which indicated that she was serious about improving the quality of her written work – which she rapidly did. I've sometimes been surprised, however, how few students know what 'ambiguity' is, what the words 'inference' and 'implication' mean and what a 'subtext' is. These are four of the most useful concepts to be able to recognise and analyse in A Level English essays. To my mind, no literary essay is quite complete without some analysis of how the text uses ambiguity.
However, there is nothing per se impressive about using recently acquired lexis or highfalutin language. The idea that 'pompous erudition = intellectual acumen' is an enduring but unhelpful myth. Outstanding essays keep their language simple and precise as they articulate complex and subtle ideas.
2. Pursue co-curricular activities because they interest you, not to generate material for a UCAS statement.
Schools often pride themselves on the range of co-curricular activities that they offer. However, A Level study is onerous and your time in the sixth-form is short so you need to think precisely about which, if any, you choose to pursue.
Baseless myths sometimes circulate around classes in the Autumn Term of Year 12: 'you're more likely to get into your first-choice university if you've taken the Duke of Edinburgh's Award'; 'Oxbridge looks more favourably on students who represent their school at a sport'. Neither of these are true – universities are looking for students who are interested enough in a subject that they can commit to studying it for three or more years and can show their understanding of it in their applications.
This doesn't mean that you should eschew all extra-curricular endeavour - far from it. One of the pleasures of your sixth-form years is to broaden your range of interests and achieve things of which you feel proud. Don't overload yourself with such commitments, however, if the upshot is that you can't manage your routine academic workload.
Some of my former students have over-burdened themselves in Year 12 – taking a non-speaking role in a school play, attempting to learn another language purely for the sake of their UCAS form, for example. These proved to be unfulfilling and time-consuming choices which they soon regretted making and to which they couldn't fully commit.
Devote yourself only to those activities that interest you and whose commitments you can manage.
3. Dedicate time to essays set for homework. Don't try to complete all essays in timed conditions.
I've encountered students who treat every essay as though it were part of a mock-exam by trying to complete it within strictly timed conditions. This approach is as misguided as attempting to prepare for a marathon by trying to run 26.2 miles every evening while ignoring matters of diet, pacing, general fitness, and so on.
Inevitably, students take time to adjust to the rigours of writing A Level essays which demand more of you than those at GCSE. It's reasonable for a student to spend between two and three hours researching, planning and writing an individual essay – and much longer for coursework assignments during the first few terms of sixth-form study. You need this time to grow familiar with the texts, consider how to express your arguments, fill the gaps in your knowledge, and so on. Your speed at doing this will increase as the skills which you practise become habits. As exam season approaches, you can then focus more specifically on writing essays of a similar standard under timed conditions.
A tutee of mine mentioned recently that she saved all the essay-plans that she had made for the essays that she wrote throughout the year. This proved a boon when the time came to revise: she could look at these plans with a critical eye and re-evaluate her earlier approach to answering each question.
4. Don't let your dislike of a particular text hinder the pleasure of studying it.
Studying English at A Level is not entertainment; you shouldn't expect to enjoy every text which you encounter on the syllabus.
I once taught a class who, almost exclusively, disliked the novel they were studying. However, in their earliest essays, they were unsure whether to express this dislike and, if so, how to do this. Some were downright unpleasant about the novel's author. Others over-compensated for their reaction by substituting hyperbolic praise for analysis, pretending that they found every element of the book hilarious. Neither approach is creditable by examiners. However, they soon broke these habits by assimilating the following advice into their writing.
If you find yourself disliking an A Level text, I recommend doing the following:
a) Identify the aspects of the text which irritate you. Try to isolate what you find so irksome about them, e.g. you find Frederic Henry's prose style in A Farewell to Arms monotonous; you consider the pastoral scenes in The Winter's Tale to lack the narrative interest of the scenes set in Leontes' court.
b) Assume that these aspects of the text are part of the text's intended meaning. For instance, why might Ernest Hemingway have given his narrator such a monotonous prose-style? We could reasonably speculate that the narrowness of his lexical choices and the formulaic quality of his grammar suggests that Lieutenant Henry can only cope with the task of recounting such traumatic events in prose if he abides by a self-imposed set of strict formal rules. It's not the only possible explanation – and it doesn't account for the similarity between Henry's style and narrative voices in Hemingway's other novels – but it is logical speculation nonetheless and thus, as far as examiners are concerned, creditable.
Similarly, does Shakespeare prolong the pastoral sub-plot of Act 4 of The Winter's Tale to whet our collective appetite for the resolution of the play's primary narrative in Act Five? If this is so, might audiences then reflect on the moral implications of such a longing to return to an environment characterised by a king's abuse of domestic and structural power? In short, might our potential frustration with aspects of Act 4 be a calculated element of the drama which both fulfils a narrative function and prompts scrutiny of a moral question?
I say more about this in relation to Tennessee Williams' presentation of Blanche Dubois in my video on A Streetcar Named Desire.
Articulating such speculations will not necessarily result in your enjoying a text any more. It will, however, guarantee that some potentially interesting analysis emerges from the otherwise unproductive emotion of annoyance.
There may, of course, be times when one cannot defend a text's shortcomings as a deliberate part of its overall meaning. For example, the power of one of the most traumatic scenes in The Kite Runner is, to my mind, diminished by the directness of the narrator's comparison between his own timidity and the bravery of his father when each face the chance to protect vulnerable people from attack. The narrator's enduring guilt would have moved me more had Hosseini left this connection for readers to infer. The directness of the parallel seems born of the author not trusting readers to connect the two events without prompting. If you were therefore asked to analyse the presentation of guilt or violence or family relations in The Kite Runner, you could, reasonably, make such an evaluative observation if supported by textual evidence.
Bear in mind, however, that an A Level class is not a book-group. Your 'gut reaction' to a book – whether you laughed at its jokes, whether you were interested in what happened to the protagonist – matters relatively little to the examiner and won't be directly sought by an exam question. What is more important is your demonstrating an understanding of how a text's constituent elements work together to generate responses in its readers.
5. Shun perfectionism: ignore pleas to be 'the best version of yourself'.
If I could expunge a single cliché from the language, it would be the edict to 'be the best version of yourself'. Why do I find it so irritating?
Firstly, the phrase is unhelpfully nebulous. To thrive at A Level, it's important to set achievable goals in both the long and short-term. This motto seems to valorise an undefined-because-undefinable idealised state-of-being that doesn't help students to focus on the business of everyday task-setting and learning.
Secondly, it encourages perfectionism which is the enemy of intellectual risk.
One's sixth-form years should be characterised by expanding intellectual horizons. The effect of this is that they will also be characterised by mistakes from which students will learn. I have known students so obsessed with the notion of being 'the best' that they find it almost impossible to write essays that are merely 'good' with the potential to become better – in some cases, to write anything at all. In the first instance, focus on producing good work – essays that are precise, insightful, well-supported and clearly structured. Your teacher can then advise you on how to improve. As a student, you will, invariably, make mistakes. Reflecting on those mistakes will be instrumental in shaping your academic development.
Lastly, I wonder if there is too much of a culture of introspection in education, manifest in mottos like this one. Is not the subtext of this phrase a sense that our motivation for doing good is bound up in rewarding ourselves with accolades for our own outstanding achievements – the equivalent of scout-badges? Should we not be encouraging students to look outwards, to treat satisfying their intellectual curiosity and helping others as satisfactions in themselves? Moreover, the selves of young people are necessarily still forming in their school years. Do we not risk imposing a fixed and narrow conception of selfhood upon them with every reiteration of this slogan?
This is not a diatribe against ambition which is doubtless the laudable kernel of this particular maxim. It is merely a plea for students' ambitions to be nourished using slightly less hyperbolic language and rooted in the achievable practicalities of day-to-day experience.
If you need any help with English A Level, please get in touch at swlondontutor@yahoo.com.
Enjoy Year 12!
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