Richard Hogan: Why right now is the optimal time to help your Leaving Cert student

Students often hold such a negative view of their potential that they develop a shield to protect themselves from inevitable failure

Richard Hogan: We all crave routine and building momentum is all about putting a healthy routine in place so that they put themselves in the optimal position to achieve in an exam. It is also important that our children know that there are many roads to any destination.

THIS time of year can be tricky. 

The mood swings, the food demands, and the constant walking on eggshells to maintain the equilibrium of tumultuous teenage emotions. Having a Leaving Certificate student in the house can feel like you are living with a diva, Mariah Carey on steroids. 

We are now 12 weeks out from the Leaving Certificate and that means what your child does now will impact the result they achieve in August. Twelve weeks is the optimal time for exam preparation, what they learn now they will recall in the exam. If the student in your house has done very little in the last year-and-a-half, they could turn the whole thing around in the course of three months. Especially, now, with all the exemptions the Department of Education and Skills have made to the exam this year.

Helping the student in your house, while maintaining your own sanity is no easy task. But it’s something you will need to master if the next 12 weeks are to be successful and drama-free. The Leaving Certificate, in its current form, suits the minority not the majority of students who undertake it. So, Many students struggle with the rote aspect this exam demands. The vast quantity of material students are expected to learn off, regurgitate and then erase and move onto the next exam is something many students find problematic.

In my experience, they think about all the work that is required just to have a baseline understanding of the subject and it puts them off starting. Like looking up at Mt Everest and thinking, ‘I’ll never make that’. But getting started and designing a sustainable study timetable is crucial. Building momentum is a process. Developing positive thinking about the exam, is all about getting them to see they can achieve and they can do well. Students often think that doing well in the exam is all about being super-intelligent, they don’t realise it is more about application, and consistency, than intelligence.

If you have a student in your house who is struggling to study, think about the belief system they hold about themselves. Often, the work I do with students is helping to free them from negative paradigms that hold them back or prevent them from thriving. For example, I often meet students who come to me for exam motivation, but it becomes immediately obvious they have constructed a very negative pattern of behaviour to protect themselves from failure. They are stuck. They refuse to study because they fundamentally believe they are not very smart and therefore when they fail to achieve they can at least say, “I didn’t study anyway, so how could I have done well?” This is such a negative example of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Students often get themselves caught in a bind like this. They hold such a negative view of their potential that they develop a shield to protect themselves from inevitable failure. Of course, the irony is lost on them. The irony being they bring the very thing they are fearful of to life; by not studying they cannot do well and therefore prove their belief system to be true. But if they challenged it, and started to study they would begin to see that their belief is wrong and their potential is limitless. Freeing your child from a negative belief could be the most important first step when it comes to your child succeeding in this year’s Leaving Certificate exam.

In my experience boys often find it hard to get focused and to develop a healthy study routine.

Smartphones have had such a deleterious impact on focus and attention. It is vitally important, over these next 12 weeks, that you help your child manage their relationship with technology. Their study area should be free from technology, particularly their phone.

Research shows that when a notification comes in and concentration is disrupted it takes a considerable amount of time to get concentration back to where it was before the notification interrupted it. More than ever, students need help with their concentration. Everything about their world is instantaneous and abbreviated. But doing well in the Leaving Cert requires the ability to concentrate for sustained periods of time. Helping your child develop a routine that allows them to study, while also having time off to celebrate being a teenager is important over these 12 weeks. The downtime is as important as the study time.

We all crave routine and building momentum is all about putting a healthy routine in place so that they put themselves in the optimal position to achieve in an exam. It is also important that our children know that there are many roads to any destination. And if they should fall short, which we all do at times, other opportunities will arise and they will succeed.