To each their own, man, but you seem to be treating the HSC like a check-list. A long, every-day-I-should-be-studying checklist. I mean sure, my opinion is going to be skewed because my only input of your life is from your 'study journal', but I feel like you are in need of a loosening up and being less traditional.
I'm not forcing you to change everything or even anything; just hear what I have to say and come to your own conclusions:
Flashtrick's Tips of Peace and Prosperity
1. Why drag a heavy cart when you can use wheels to roll it? Why try out for the Olympic Swimming if you can't even swim 50m?
Each person has their own strengths and weaknesses. You are only hindering yourself by not knowing what yours are.
Look through past tests, ask your friends, observe yourself in daily life.
Strengths: These include but are not limited to HSC subject-specific strengths [like "I'm good at integrating"]. Things like creativity, perseverance, lateral thinking, strong empathy, good logic, and structured writing are examples of possible strengths
Weaknesses: Again, these include but are not limited to HSC [like "I can't remember biology terms"]. Weaknesses can be unable to handle stress, poor time management, obtrusive and random thoughts, messy writing, poor logic and others.
Have confidence in your strengths and be critical of your weaknesses.
Identifying your skills (and lack of them) can help you create study plans specifically catered for you. For instance, if you're a creativity little boy, it could be better for you to tackle integration questions head-on without looking at the examples, such that you develop your own way of analyzing questions and determining the most elegant solution. But if you're a big girl good at memorizing steps, then by all means, memorize each different method of solving integrals.
2. Personalize your study notes and memorization.
This will speed up your learning beyond belief if you don't do it already. It's pretty much using the whole idea of acronyms, acrostic poems, rhyming couplets, and other stuff. Just make it relate-able to your own knowledge (outside of academics that is)
My own examples:
- Learning reactivity series in chem:
KNaCaMgAlZnFe Tin Lead copper silver gold platinum (something like that)
How I remember it:
Kanaka - M. Gal - ZinFe - Tin - Lead --- then the rest were based on the olympic medals (bronze, silver, gold)
My explanation:
I'd sorta just say the whole thing to remember it (minus the olympic medals) Remembering the word 'kanaka' isn't that hard - it was the names used for the imported workers on the sugar canes (year 7 history lesson). As for the later part of the series, gold is best in Olympics, so it's least reactive with the exception of platinum, which is just too cool.
- Indicator Colours:
The day before chem exams, I'd just create short acronyms (first letter comes from acid side, the neutral, then basic). RGB is one of them. Can't remember which indicator though, haha, been too long.
BB was a pair of letters I'd never forgot, since it came up so often [Blue=Basic, definitely applies for the litmus paper can't remember others]
- Electromagnetic Spectrum Progression
RMIVUXG
radio-mirco-infra-visible and so on
How I learnt it? One simple questions.
A
re
mivux good?
Doesn't make any sense but it worked and so many of my friends used it throughout the year for physics.
For content that has to be memorized, such that intuition, creativity, logic and anything else doesn't work, personalize your notes and don't be afraid of them being quirky and absurd. After all, weird and radical are more memorable than plain and bland.
3. There is 'study' outside of study.
You mentioned before that you felt that you wasted a period by playing chess. It was not a waste. Games make you think. They exercise your brain. Like a muscle, the more you use it, the stronger it becomes.
Think of athletes. Let Athlete X be one that trains extremely hard on-season and sits around on his couch off-season. Let Athlete Y be one that trains diligently all year round. Athlete Y will be the superior competitor: he won't be drained during his matched cause he isn't pushing excessively hard in training on-season and he will have maintained fitness during off-season.
On-season=studying HSC material
Off-season=your time outside of that
Playing board games, reading books, playing sports all count as part of your off-season training. Unlike athletes, as a HSCer, you can switch between on- and off-season anytime you want. Doing productive off-season activities will let you rest for when you decide to go back to on-season (study) and can also prevent you from reaching fatigue during on-season. Balance. Smart balance. It will make things more enjoyable, fill you with passion and motivation and improve you further.
Hope that analogy wasn't too confusing. Actually.... hope that analogy actually made some sense at all.
Well, I'm done. Can't think of anything else.
P.S. You're better off doing full-body workouts than a split. I used to go to the gym for a little bit, and full-body workouts feel a lot better afterwords (with the whole endorphin rush and all). Compound movements train the stabilizers, antagonists and agonist muscle groups better than isolations [maybe scratch the part about the agonist muscle group, since isolations are, indeed, isolations], resulting in better strength, muscle and fitness gains.
