
Quite often students begin the year in a casual stride and who is to blame them? After all, they have just come off holidays (about 1 ½ months’ worth).
I come from a sports training background and understand that an athlete who wants to perform well will not take six weeks off their training year. The repercussions are too great as they will lose too much form. They must work too hard to get back to square one.
A dedicated rugby player will be maintaining his/her aerobic fitness with moderate exercise during the off-season. When January comes around, they are ready to start full swing on improving their strengths, building on fitness and working on skills. That is how you stay ahead of the pack.
Most learners will forget the last four weeks of learning over the six weeks of Christmas break. Pretty much everything learned in November is lost by the time they go back to school in January/February.
I often wonder why students don’t undertake the same planning when it comes to academic performance. Most students and parents of students are willing to let the achievements of the final months of the previous year disappear through resting the brain after the school year.
The brain doesn’t need that much time to recover. In fact, that length of time of recovery is detrimental. The last month of knowledge learned prior to exams has been lost and must be relearned in the first month of the new year!
During the last two weeks of the Christmas holidays many students maintain their academic conditioning by working with their Academic Coach at after-school tuition. Some use their coach (their tutor) to work on their weaknesses from last year while others use the time to get a head start on the subject they know is in the next year.
These guys, like their athletic counterparts, are staying ahead of the pack. Is it worthwhile? You bet it is. They will go into the new year confident and stress free. They have locked in with their coach who is helping them to perform at their peak.
We live in a competitive world and those who rise to the top are those who are willing to go the extra mile to achieve that result. Time and effort are often put into young people with their sport, but will that effort bring a return on investment for them? Will these skills bring them an income? Most likely not.
If the same effort was put into their academic ability, or at least more evenly distributed well……
By Peter Kenyon: Online Maths Tutor




Not everyone learns the same way, and that creates problems in classrooms and at home.
One kid called Danoah was all alone in a mysterious dark place. He saw zombies roaming towards him and the sound was like this: brrrrr. He ran as fast as he could, and then he saw a warrior and the warrior saved Danoah by chasing away the zombies with his enchanted diamond sword. Danoah went on his way and climbed the ladder to heaven and asked the Shining Spirit, “Why did you make all the zombies?” The Shining One said “you must not take the mysterious dark path again.
On Christmas eve in the foyer of a hotel there was a Christmas tree and in the tree, there was a koala. She had a baby, and nobody knew they were there, but they didn’t know where they were. The mummy koala tried to find where she was, but she nearly got stood on by a girl in black pants and high heels. She finally made it out of the hotel foyer and she ran back to the forest where there were lots of trees. She wished the hotel with the Christmas tree was further away from her forest.
Only on dark nights when there is no moon, from a big house in the city, the ginger and black cat leaves to go out adventuring. She is small, friendly and adventurous. She goes, with her friends, to an underground river where there is a little house that is full of woolly pink balls and cat food that tastes like marshmallows. They play for three hours, eat for one hour and then they sleep until they wake up. On dark nights the cat goes home and then she goes to sleep.
Once upon a time, a little boy named Ethan lived in a very nice neighbourhood, in a very nice house but the people who were raising him were very, very horrible and selfish. Even though they were fat and rich, his punishment was so cruel that they locked him up in the cellar for most of the day and while his mother and father were upstairs eating fudge and custard, Ethan was living on the mould and bacteria off the walls. One night, he heard squeaking and it sounded like a million mice and he was certain because he could smell rat droppings as well. Little tiny mice were chewing the wall and Ethan was happy to see daylight because the wall had disintegrated. Ethan got out and found a new home to live in with nice people.