This blog post should be called – ‘What to do if you have a rubbish teacher and still want to succeed in the topic’.
First don’t moan about it, get round it. So, to avoid your rubbish teacher’s information, get the teacher materials, the exam boards for many exams produce excellent and concise study guides for teachers. These contain all the information you need to know for your exams and all the information the teacher should be teaching you.
Work out how much of the information you need to know and learn it. Follow the basic revision plan I described above. If your exam requires you to write an essay, buy my Guide, to show you how to learn the information quickly.
There are two types of students’ reactions to bad teachers. The first is to moan about it and ensure that you earn a bad grade because of bad teaching. The second is to take matters into your own hands, teach yourself and use the teachers bad teaching to learn what you shouldn’t be doing.
A third point I should make is, even if you are teaching yourself, make sure that the answers and the exam technique you have suits the course you are doing. The best way to do this is to practice answering exam questions. If possible, find a teacher you trust to look at your exam answers and suggest improvements.
Revision is not simply a matter of memorisation. If you memorised all the wrong information then you would fail the exam. Think early on in your course about what the information is that you are going to be examined on and what is the easiest way to learn this information.
The starting point for this is your course guide or syllabus. You should make sure that you understand what information it is that you will be examined and what you need to know to achieve the highest exam marks. Work out early how many essays you are going to need to write in the exams and how many topics you are going to need to master before you reach the exam room. It’s a simple equation. Once you have identified the number of essays you need to write and the topics you need to know about you have the basics of a revision plan.
The next way to improve this plan is either to work out when you are going to learn the information. This is the amount of time you have before the exam. Once you have all these elements then you can start to revise know that you are following a revision timetable.