Me too! I can't really ever switch off, so I've been trying to go on as many walks as I can to clear my head and free up some space in there. I've had a detox from my phone, trying to only spend 45 minutes on it per day (so far so good as of day 3), and I've found that it's given me so much space in my head to just be, and to process the huge challenge of year 12 that is ahead.
In terms of procrastinating holiday homework, I hear you! I'm exactly the same, although trying to make a start today. Good luck with yours!
Looking forward to reading more of your VCE chronicles 
Wow a phone detox is a great idea, I should give it a go as well. Good luck with your holiday homework too!
lovely to see a new journal appear, and with such a beautiful name hehe (im obsessed with the vocative "bean" if you've read my journal)! happy new year and good luck with year 12!
Thanks and happy new year as well!
Hi Beansprout! I'm so excited to follow your journey throughout yr 12. I'm also going into to Yr 12 this year so woohoo! Ooo, I'm also interested in science/biomed/health science courses. I'm not doing methods either (just doing further) and honestly, despite it being a prereq for several courses, I couldn't be happier with my choice to do further instead (the idea of doing methods along with my other subjects sounds way too stressful 
). Anyway, hopefully 2022 will be better than the last two years! I don't think I can cope with lots more online learning hahaha! 
It's so cool that we're leaning towards the same courses! I really hope the pandemic gets better this year as well but it doesn't seem very likely. I'm worried about the possibility that schools could be constantly switching between online and onsite whenever someone gets covid.
new year It's nearly been two whole weeks of 2022 so I felt like making a post. So I started completing my homework on the 5th and have been working pretty consistently for 2 hours maximum everyday, except for today. I went to bed at 4am today, causing me to wake up at 10:30am and have extremely sore and heavy eyes. I had absolutely no motivation to get up so I didn’t bother until around 11:30am and then I just ate breakfast and watched (still watching, just paused to write this) the last season of When They Cry. As I said in my last comment I have attempted to fix my sleep schedule but I’m still failing. To be honest, the time I go to bed rarely even affects how I feel or when I wake up. The entire holidays up until last night I had gone to bed at around 1-2 am and I usually woke up at 8 out of habit. I brag about this but it really isn’t a good thing. I do tend to have a good schedule once school starts since I know I have to sleep so I can concentrate in school and all which motivates me to put down my phone and actually SLEEP, but I know how important it is to get good sleep now to be energised and refreshed for when year 12 starts so hopefully I can actually get 8 hours of sleep or more if I’m lucky.. Anyways, on to the academic stuff
In year 11, Further and Psych were my favourite subjects by far since they were just so easy to do well in and also quite fun. These were the subjects I always averaged 90s in so they were the only results I would show my parents
BIOBio was okay, I like most of the content but I always averaged 80-85% which really humbled me because I never dropped a mark when I did Year 10 Bio (except for the prac report where I got 87%. I remember the exact percentage since it still haunts me that I would’ve gotten the bio award that year if it wasn’t for that score). Something I’ve noticed from all of my Bio sacs are that for those 3 or 4 mark questions I would always lose maybe 1 or 2 marks and I think that this stems from me not understanding what the question is asking from me (Explain, Discuss etc) and I also didn’t really understand how to apply the content in the scenarios provided in the questions or at least couldn’t articulate a well worded response which I hear is vital for doing well in the exam. I also had a sick obsession with Anki during the start of the year and I had about 200 cards for each topic and each answer was 4-5 sentences long. I realise now how extreme that was and I would just sit there for hours memorising these paragraphs. It didn’t pay off at all since all I had memorised were hundreds of definitions when the sacs only had about 3 ‘define’ questions. I relied on my common sense for multiple choice and application questions but without a solid understanding I couldn’t answer those as well as I wanted to. I still believe that Anki is a helpful tool but I definitely wasn’t using it properly and I know a lot of people who are in the same place I was. If anyone reading this is using Anki or just flashcards and doesn’t already know this, make sure you only start using them once you have a good grasp of the content already. And don’t just write your notes onto the cards like I did, make them as condensed as possible and definitely do not make 200+ cards per topic. I think this goes for normal notes as well, don’t worry about anything not on the study design even if it's in the textbooks.
CHEMOnto Chemistry which was the bane of my existence for the entirety of Yr 11. I didn’t do Chemistry in Year 10 and barely paid attention during Year 9 so I was basically starting from scratch. I also only chose this subject for Unit 2 so all of the balancing equations, inter/intramolecular forces and organic chem they did in Unit 1 were completely new to me. This meant a lot of Edrolo during those term 2 holidays. So for my Unit 2 results, I only got scores between 60 and 70 percent. I was really happy with this because I was passing, which really shocked me considering the fact that I had no prior knowledge of this subject at all and a lot of Unit 1 was continued into Unit 2. I’m going to be getting tutoring for Chem this year and I’ll definitely be relying on that to increase my scores a little bit.
PSYCHLike I previously mentioned, Psychology was seriously so easy for me last year. Like bio, I heavily relied on Anki for it in semester 1 but I was still able to do really well in it. As easy as it was, there was nothing productive about how I studied and I can't even say that I learnt anything. One of my worst moments is when I sat down for hours and transcribed a 90 page powerpoint into my exercise book and then proceeded to write all of this into flashcards. I never even looked at my notes after that so it was a complete waste of time. Anki and I inevitably broke up two days before my unit 1 psych exam when I hadn’t studied at all so I just crammed the flashcards for a couple of hours. By the way, I had more than double the amount of flashcards I had in bio for psych. I was so exhausted by the end of this that I only ended up doing half of the flashcards and just accepted that I would fail. I somehow scraped a 90% on that exam. I still hated Anki after that and didn’t touch it for the rest of the year. On a positive note, the topics I’m most looking forward to covering in Psych this year are sleep and phobias. I used to be in love with the nervous system but that ship has sailed and the content so far is basically a repeat of unit 1 and isn’t stimulating at all for me.
So far this year the only subjects I have begun doing holiday homework/studying for are psych, further and lit. My goals for all of my subjects are to prepare for the first sacs of term 1 and to have all of my AOS 1 notes prepared.
My progress:For Psychology I’ve started watching the edrolos and reading the textbook pdf and have taken some notes and answered textbook questions. I don’t bother with the powerpoints we are given since I know my teacher will recite them like a script once we come back to school anyway.
For Further I have completed Chapter 1 and 2 and the chapter reviews for both. I still have a separate booklet of Holiday Homework questions that I need to finish
For Literature I’ve only read the picnic at hanging rock so far but it doesn’t count because technically I read it last year. I’ve tried to read The Winter’s Tale which is also a text I’m studying. I had to use sparknotes’ translation to read it and summarise for the assigned homework. I also watched a stage play I found on youtube but I was absolutely drained by the end of it. Overall, I do think that it’s a really interesting and tragic story which I like so I look forward to studying it further during the year.
Hope everyone is having a good year so far 
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Topic: Beansprout's Year 12 (VCE) chronicles (Read 6364 times)