You’ve studied constantly for the past few weeks on a mission to get the best mark possible in the latest maths exam. You’ve lost track of the amount of times you’ve re-read over the English essay to make sure it flows well. Not to mention the time you spent revising your business notes to make sure that you were prepared for the in class test or the time you toiled over your visual art major work.
But somehow, the marks still didn’t reflect the work.
You feel useless. Upset. Hurt. Angry. Frustrated. Annoyed. Bad. Confused. Like giving up.
All of these feelings are normal and are in fact encouraged here at Tutoring4All. We understand that at the end of the day we are all humans and share various feelings. Rather than always focus on the positive, we also take the time to consider other emotions and feelings in order to develop a holistic approach and guide our students with the benefit of emotional capacities.
Our tutors share in the belief that the first step to improving in the results for the next set of assessments is firstly acknowledging your feelings, then taking the step to accept your feelings. The final and often most challenging step is to make a conscience choice to overcome those feelings, set a goal and then importantly make decisions to stick to the goal and allow it to be achieved.
An important part of the learning journey is understanding why you feel certain ways about a result or mark and then being able to control those feelings in order to produce the results you are after. By simply adopting feelings of sadness or holding onto feelings of self-doubt and unworthiness, these choices will not help in achieving better marks next time. In fact, it would be counterproductive. Think about all the energy spent on those acts when you could have been using them to better yourself. We encourage our students to focus on their goals and understand that they have the support system to achieve them. Our students learn to be independent thinkers, aware of the feelings and reactions and therefore, be in control.
Often we can let our feelings of being hard done by, harsh marking or being the victim of a situation get the better of our rational thinking. Could it be possible that perhaps we were having an off day and what we wrote was in fact not of a high quality? Maybe our pre-conceived ideas of a high standard could have been falsely established and its time we self-reflect before accusing others.
These are our thoughts on this area, perhaps some what down the line but we find that we achieve the most with this approach. We look forward to your comments and an opportunity to speak with you about the ways we can help.