“Creating this website has been a humbling experience!”
Little did I know how that phrase would come back and haunt me when I typed it into my initial “experimental” blog post as I took my first tentative steps creating this website. What possessed me to think that I could build a website with nothing but YouTube videos, confusing online support documents and no one to turn to when I hit the frequent (daily) obstacles that lay in wait? It seemed like a good idea during a winter lockdown BUT I have been brutally reminded what it must be like to be an ‘A’ level student who is struggling. Yes, “creating this website has been a humbling experience!” Every time I thought I knew where I was going technology threw in a curve ball, but I persevered and here we are, and you are reading this! My experience brings to mind something I have said to my students on numerous occasions.
“You don’t need to be “bright” to do well in your ‘A’ levels. It’s all a matter of approach!”
I am NOT telling you that ‘A’ levels aren’t demanding. THEY ARE. Doing well at ‘A’ level is like climbing Everest! Perhaps you cannot imagine how you will ever reach the summit. Perhaps reaching the summit feels impossible because you are struggling to find the right path. Perhaps en route you will take a wrong turn. (I took LOTS of those while I was building this website.) The thing is, you’re not going to get to the summit if you don’t keep going.
And keeping going means we have to take hundreds (…..make that thousands) of tiny steps.
When climbing a mountain you may walk for 10 minutes and feel like you have made no progress. You look upwards and the summit feels no nearer. Studying is just the same! You work for a week and may feel no nearer to your goal. Those who persevere and keep taking those tiny incremental steps forwards and upwards do, after a short while and when they look back over their shoulder, start to see the distance they have travelled. I want you to look upon each and every time you sit down to study as a few of those tiny steps forward and upwards, even if it doesn’t feel like it! Sometimes for two or three weeks I would sit down to work on this website and move absolutely no further forward. (I fell out of love with it on numerous occasions.) In retrospect, I can now see that I was “learning” – learning what NOT to do, but I had to go through that process to find the right solution and unfortunately there were no shortcuts.
Ah shortcuts…..there are no shortcuts to the top of the mountain.
No last-minute sprints to the summit I’m afraid. To truly understand something takes time! Yes, I too fell into this trap: I was seduced by YouTube videos telling me I could create a website in an hour. If you really want to get to grips with the material on alevelmusicteacher.com I urge you to work through the question booklets rather than simply looking at the answers. I guarantee if you do this that the information will “stick”, which will save you precious time in the long run.
We all hate that time, don’t we, leading up the exam when we have revision to do and we are trying to make sense of everything we have covered and actually, we feel overwhelmed? If we assimilate something well enough on ‘first touch’, believe me, the job of revision becomes increasingly redundant.”
Still need convincing? Let me put it another way……I say to my students that I am no brighter or able than they are. Do they think I “revise” the night before I teach a lesson?? It’s all a matter of approach. Here we go again! I am able to teach a given topic and explain things only because I really know it. Because I too have had to take the hundreds (….thousands) of tiny steps required to get my head around whatever topic it is. When you keep “picking away” at something like this it sticks! And this is what the student booklets on this website are designed to do: they will lead you through a process whereby a lot of the material WILL be understood and a lot of it WILL stick.
Try this experiment: Read through an answer booklet a couple of times, highlight some key phrases and maybe even write a few things out on post-it notes, and see how much you remember the following week OR actually work through the student booklet. You will really get the grey-matter working as you do this. Afterwards you can check your answers in the answer booklet. I’m sure you’ll be very interested to see how you did. And that’s the thing, if you fully engage with subject matter you WILL remember so much more when asked about it the following week.
So, what about that phrase “creating this website has been a humbling experience” Well as I STRUGGLED with the concept and functionality of posts, pages, categories, widgets and such like in a frustrated pea-souper that bloomin’ phrase kept popping up (uninvited) all over the place. (It did in fact park itself on my homepage for several months.) It was like it was taunting me! I would scratch my head “WHY is that there?” If you are still reading, I probably haven’t inspired much confidence. Thank goodness I am a better music teacher than I am website builder!
I might have struggled to find anyone to point me in the right direction but I finally got there (…..HERE!), very slowly and after getting lost too many times to count. The point is though, I kept taking those tiny steps and eventually I emerged from the fog and the summit came into view. This website is about inviting you to do the same and the good news is you have some experienced mountain guides, your teacher and alevelmusicteacher.com, to help you reach the summit.