Back in year 10 and the whirlpool of mixed interfaced learning that covid brought about, I had a math teacher who now thinking back was pretty instrumental in my journey to 4 Unit mathematics in HSC to 2nd year Aerospace Engineering mathematics. But at the time I hated her and I hated math (especially trig). She was a pretty run of the mill math teacher giving us all the homework in the world being just a mere page of it and worst of all she checked our works weekly! This however was what set me and our class especially apart through not only going back and fixing our mistakes and diagnosing them, but rather the hard truth of getting good at mathematics being the sheer repetition of studying it. Much like how writing sentences down for study notes being scientifically proven to improve memory and knowledge retention, consistently solving equations really does help speeding up the time to solve, as well as rewiring the brains way of going about solving abstract questions. I found this particularly rewarding once I started studying and solving integration throughout Advanced, Extension 1 and Extension 2, where a lot of aspects such as trigonometry and the location of variables trigger a form of pattern recognition that grows stronger with time and is rather quite fun. Now of course this goes without saying that some people simply just have a more of a mathematical affinity compared to other subjects the same way some people are better at acting or writing or music playing, however these same techniques can be applied to a vast range of subjects and is what study techniques utilise on a day to day basis. What I will say is that studying is generally speaking never fun and after going through 13 years of schooling till HSC I do sympathise with many of the young people who still have a few years left, however it is one of the many truths of learning that the one sure-fire way to get better at something, is practice, application, and repetition.

Starsky Schepers