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PSE Study Habits Reflection

How do you approach lessons?
In general, I would say that the in-class lesson itself is when I do the most amount of “studying”. By paying attention in class, I’m able to retain a lot of what is learnt, thus minimizing how much work I have to do out of class. While it does depend on the subject, I do typically takes notes in class. Where my note-taking differs, however, is in my usage of them. If I’m being honest, I only really go over my notes from history as this is essential in the writing of essays. However, I don’t think I’ve ever really gone through class notes for any other subject that I take.

How you approach ongoing learning between classes?
I don’t really study between classes. Truthfully, I only study if there will be an assessment. However, I do tend to try and do as much homework as possible – I typically only consistently do history and English homework though.

How you approached your previous assessments and exams?
In terms of assessments, I start studying far too late (if at all). I find myself only really doing actual study for biology, mathematics and Chinese. I have a really bad habit of only studying the night before a test (or even the day of), however, I am trying to improve this. I began studying for my recent mathematics test 3 days in advance, and I feel like this did help me as my score did improve quite significantly from the previous test. On the other hand, my Chinese test is tomorrow and I haven’t begun studying yet. Trying to study more frequently is definitely a goal that I have set myself.

This pattern of procrastination also, unfortunately, applies to my ethic towards exams. For the grade 10 mocks, I only studied science and mathematics in advance. I distinctly remember going through all my notes for Food Tech literally in a car on the way to school the day of my exam. This is something I’m definitely trying to combat this year. I hopefully will begin studying for all of my exams early – not just mathematics and biology. I would also like to see myself studying for subjects such as English and Economics – subjects I kind of just disregard as not needing to study for.

PSE Self-Advocacy Unit Reflection

Throughout this PSE unit, we have focussed on self-advocacy, self-knowledge and informed decision making. In terms of what I have been able to develop the greatest, I believe it would be self-advocacy and knowledge. While I have previously done some of the things on MaiaLearning such as the job recommendations quiz and work values, I never really had an allocated class time to consider what these things meant. By allowing myself time to consider the meaning of things such as the Myers-Briggs test and future visualization, I have actually begun to construct an idea of what my future could potentially be like. Of course, it’s simple to just briefly consider the future without consideration of personal values and so being in a setting where I was forced to evaluate my thoughts was very beneficial as it allowed me to both think about my future, and also evaluate upon ideas I previously had about it. This visualization allowed me to consider both short and long-term goals and how to plan for them. What were my long term goals? How would I achieve them? These questions were essential in the formation of my plan. Using the knowledge I had gained from myself from doing the visualization, I updated my post-secondary plan.

In order to improve our ability to self-advocate, we did a variety of activities such as an elevator pitch and a networking activity, in which we assumed different roles and practiced meeting new people. I found the networking to be decent, given that I already knew everyone in the classroom environment. I struggle with meeting and talking to new people so the hardest part of networking wasn’t even a factor in the success of networking. When doing the elevator pitch, I kind of struggled with finding what to say. Obviously, I only had a minute to give a representation of myself. The biggest struggle here came in when I had to decide what was important enough to add, and what would simply be filler details. The pitch itself was good given that I was able to roughly plan ahead about what I was going to say. The feedback I received from this what just that I talked too fast and I should also self-advocate more. The latter of this advice was honestly a bit strange to hear given that it’s generally not wise to brag or overspeak of your achievements. Given that I tend to either speak really fast or slow when nervous, this is only an issue that I will be able to combat with more practice.

All of this together helped me to make informed decisions. Prior to doing any of this, many of the decisions I would have made would not have been properly informed. With consideration of the type of person I am, alongside what I value in life, I was able to make more specific and relevant decisions about my university choices.

Overall, this unit helped me to reflect upon myself and the decisions I have made regarding my future. It allowed me to develop a post-secondary plan that would aid my UAC advisor in my eventual university decisions. As someone that generally procrastinates often, being able to do all of this during class time helped me with completing all of the tasks.

Emotional Intelligence PSE

 

Admire Dislike
Can let go of their mistakes quite easily

Sufficient sleep

Doesn’t let anyone limit the joy in their life

 

 

 

 

 

 Cannot accept no for an answer
Toxic behaviour
Lots of negative self-talk
Expects a lot of stuff in return for doing something

Easily offended

 

 

 

Skill I want to develop and why Skill I want to avoid and why
I want to sleep more

I would like to be able to stop negative self-talk

 

 I would like to avoid seeking perfection

 

This year, I would like to develop the skill/quality of stopping negative self-talk. This is important to me because I often bring myself down. This will help me grow as a person and hopefully, gain a more positive perspective on life. This will help others view me as a more approachable person and improve my ability to collaborate with others. I dislike how I can’t let go of mistakes. I see this in myself very often, especially in the academic part of my life. This bothers me because it makes it difficult to move on from a situation and grow. I can overcome this by limiting negative self-talk and learning to be more forgiving of my personal mistakes. 

Transitioning Into Grade 11

As the end of grade 10 approaches and looms over us, it’s pretty timely to write about transitioning into grade 11. My chosen subjects for next year are:

HL: Biology, Physics and History
SL: English Literature, Mandarin Chinese and Mathematics: Analysis

Out of all these subjects, I am most excited about biology. Biology has always been one of my favourite subjects throughout my life, and I’m keen to see where IB biology will take me. Choosing the subjects themselves was actually really difficult for me, as I had to both think about my interests and my universities. I already knew I was going to take a double science, with one of them being biology. While I felt that bio-chem would be a better combination, I am taking physics as I am more interested in it. I was a bit on the fence for which humanities I wanted to take. In GCSE’s, I took history and I’m still really interested in it. However, I also find economics to be intriguing and was considering taking it for my IB. Ultimately, I ended up choosing history for logistical reasons. I couldn’t decide between them as I had an equal interest in both, and neither would disadvantage my university applications. As there are far more economics HL classes than history HL classes, if I wanted to transfer from one to the other it would be easier to do so from history to economics than the other way around.

I’m definitely anxious for grade 11 as it’s a whole new experience, but I’m also really excited about the potential growth and opportunities that I will get in IB. Truthfully, I’m most excited for Project Week in grade 11.

My Personal Statement 2020

As the final part of my IGCSE experience ends, I am writing a reflection of the first two years of high school. The amount of personal growth I have gone through since the beginning of high school is tremendous. I have not only become more mature as a person but have also come out of my shell. Grade 10 certainly had plenty of ups and downs but has for the most part been a great year.

This year in football, I won the MVP award. Winning this award meant a lot to me as it gave me a sense of recognition for the growth I had experienced in sport from grade 9 to now. Not only was there just a significant change in skill, in grade 9 I would definitely say I stuck to myself more instead of socializing and communicating with the team. This year I realized how much more I was interacting with my teammates and how that positively impacted the way we played on the field. I think the catalyst for this change would be the BISP football 7’s trip during the middle of grade 9. As one of the oldest on the team (I was 15 on the 15 and under team), I had to take on a lot more responsibility than I was previously used to, and also be more confident. My coach let us know how impactful our attitudes were on the other younger girls, and from that, I began to be more confident and positive. I decided not to do touch rugby this year, as when the time came for me to sign up for tryouts I realized that I had other more important things going on at the time. While I do realize the importance of continuing my activities, I had to prioritize and came to the conclusion that it would be more beneficial for me to not play that season.

Something I learnt from last year was that grades weren’t everything. Obviously, I still want to achieve high grades but I stopped placing as much importance on them and stopped letting them completely take over my current mood. Coming into high school, I definitely would have put academics as the most important thing, but I’ve now realized that compromising mental health for higher grades was not only bad for my health but also flawed. After making that realization, I have placed more importance on my mental health and my grades have actually also improved.

Following the cancellation of my favourite service (ReCycle) so far, I had to join a new service this year. Ultimately, I ended up choosing the service AMK (Ang Mo Kio) MINDS. MINDS is a local Singaporean service that works with those who are intellectually disabled (ID). Our goal was to help them prepare for the Special Olympics. We spent a few months, in the beginning, preparing for the service and learning as much as possible. Although we spent plenty of time learning in the classroom environment, the transition from that to physically being there was still quite significant. I found this service to be quite fulfilling as I was able to develop not only my own abilities but also that of others. We worked with the same client throughout the whole service as it would make it easier for both them and us. By doing so, we allowed our clients to become comfortable with us and allowed ourselves to become more accustomed to our clients. Through this service, I have met some incredible people. While I was certainly apprehensive when joining this service (it was almost as if feeling like a fish out of water), the sense of pride I got from seeing the progress in both myself and those I was working with was incredible. I really hope to continue this service next year.

Grade 10 has been a really good year for me, and I’m honestly amazed at the progress I have made from the start of grade 9 until now. The progress I’ve made wasn’t really apparent to me until I took the time to review my IGCSE journey. Despite not being able to take my final exams due to the coronavirus pandemic, I’ve still learnt a lot about myself in the two years of the curriculum. With three weeks left of online learning, I’m excited to see where the summer and beginning of grade 11 take me.

  • BISP Football 7's Tournament.

PSE Reflection: Lockdown Blues

Lockdown blues is a term we have become extremely familiar with. Following the announcement of Singapore’s Circuit Breaker, we all tried to prepare for a month at home. Obviously, most people are aware of and understanding of the reasoning behind having a CB however, that doesn’t make staying at home for extended periods of time bearable. Initially, I was actually pretty okay with it. I could still call or text friends, and remote learning was a new experience. Soon enough though, I became less sanguine with everything. Calling friends doesn’t quite replace seeing them in real life, and online school soon enough became a complete drag with ridiculously high amounts of screen time. What once just seemed like an extended holiday with family quickly became intolerable. The only difference between weekends and weekdays was what time I woke up, and the things I usually look forward to on a regular school day, such as sports and lunch with friends, were now gone. Of course, not everything is all bad. I’m able to get whatever I need within seconds, and being tired in the midday is quickly solved by walking two steps to my bed and napping.