Improve the quality of your FSE's

5 Ways to do well on your FSEs

After coming back from a relaxing winter break we arrive to loads of work, tests, studying, and the dreaded FSE’s. FSE’s can be as small as an essay or as big as a 75 minute presentation with diagrams and all. Some of us may be lucky with two, whereas some of us may be overwhelmed with four. There is no need to panic after reading this blog about how to do well on your FSEs.

1. Don’t leave it to the last minute.

So you’ve put your FSE off for a while and it’s Thursday night at 6:00 p.m. and you remember “Isn’t my English FSE due tomorrow?” You begin to panic, scramble all over the place, 4 Red Bulls, 3 pots of coffee, 3 hours of sleep and a finished FSE. Then a week later you get back your mark and a 52!? How could this be? Well, I am no doctor, but it seems to me that you have a case of the procrastinator bug. The ‘procrastinator bug’ is a very harmful illness that affects almost all high school students. Procrastinating can actually threaten our personal health, productivity, and even our own happiness.

Now, how can you change that 52 to an 82 and get rid of your procrastinator bug? First of all, you need to catch yourself in the act of procrastination; when you find yourself thinking about that FSE that your teacher has given you, don’t let it just run through your head; start! The sooner you start, the sooner you will finish. Second, you need to understand what you are doing (or really what you aren’t doing). Don’t just let it go; you need to take control of your mind if you really want to do well on that FSE. Third, don’t forget about it. Continue each day to work on it and fight that procrastinator bug. The more consistent you are with procrastinating your procrastination and doing your FSE instead, the more likely you are to be more successful.

2. Go back and edit

The moment everyone has been waiting for; time for the teacher to return our FSEs. She drops it down on your desk and it looks like she spilled a bottle of red ink on it. Circles here and there, left and right, up and down, North and South, everywhere you look. Now you wonder “Can I even speak English?” The answer is yes, and if you couldn’t you’d have a far harder time reading this blog. It doesn’t just go for English though; French, Spanish, random History essays, tedious Science teachers who need every word written correctly on a lab like “Xanthosis” or even the math teacher who just wanted you to spell “asymptote” right in the communication section. Now here is where the beauty lies; our teachers give us a lot of time to prepare our FSEs so why not utilize not only the time, but the people with the same knowledge around us to help.

Our minds like to think quicker than our hands do therefore we are bound to make mistakes on the paper. There are many ways this can be avoided and just some examples could be:

• Correcting sites

-There are many sites that help with correcting spelling, grammar, and punctuation. This is very helpful for language subjects such as English, French, and Spanish. It’s always nice to double check just in the case that maybe you forgot to put a comma and your sentence comes out sounding like “I dare you to eat that man” instead of “I dare you to eat that, man.” Some websites that may be helpful for you are:

• English: http://www.reverso.net/spell-checker/english-spelling-grammar/

• French: http://bonpatron.com/en/

• Spanish: http://spanishchecker.com/en/

• Peer editing

-They say friends are always there to catch you when you fall, so why not when you dropped the “‘re” in “you’re” and you put “your” instead? Well no matter what peer editing is always a great form of editing. With peer editing you not only get a fresh mind to find mistakes, but as well a fresh perspective full of different ideas, opinions, and outlook. This could help improve a mediocre short story to something that could be a New York #1 best seller for 17 weeks straight.

• Teacher editing

-Now who is better than the head honcho himself? Who knows better as to what the format of the FSE should be than the man himself who distributed the rubric? That’s right; the teacher. Teachers don’t only just teach and mark, but they also help and quite a bit. Don’t be afraid to ask for help if you’re stuck or even help revise your rough copies. They know best what the expectations for the project so why not kill two birds with one stone?

3. Time Management

So you’ve finally got yourself to sit down and start your FSE and then what? You have no idea where to start. Let’s take our project and see it as a journey; there’s a beginning and there’s an end. And with every journey, you need a map. What a map does is helps you get you where you’re going, makes you aware of where you are, and keeps you on track. Now instead of a map for our “journey” you can use a schedule for your FSE.

Schedules are great tools to use for managing times with your FSEs. Schedules can also be used as little rough copies of your own FSE; putting on topics you may want to cover, things you may want to incorporate into your FSE, and so on. As well, you can set little time goals as to when you want and/or need them done. By setting little goals one feels more accomplished and more confident and motivated to continue on with their FSE to accomplish more things.

4. Breaks

No one likes a banana that is too ripe, so why would we like a brain that’s too overworked? It’s true; when someone works for too long their brain begins to become weak and their effectiveness of work and creativity decreases. That’s why we need to take breaks. Breaks can be more beneficial than not when doing an activity that takes a long period of time, i.e., a FSE.

Breaks should be taken every 45-60 minutes and breaks should be no more than 20 minutes in length. Trying to find little tasks you can check off that will fit into a 45-60 minute time frame is a great way to measure time without stressing that something feels incomplete or thinking you’ve done nothing in that amount of time. As well, your break’s should not be spent tweeting or liking pictures on insta; your break’s should be spent doing things to refresh your brain such as eating, reading a book, doing a little exercise or taking a shower.

5. Follow the Rubric

So teachers spend hours typing out guidelines, instructions, expectations, ideas, and grading process then use up lots of ink and paper to finally hand out a rubric, and then us, the students, read along as he or she reads it to us and then into the pile of FSE papers it goes. But maybe just maybe could that piece of paper be useful to you during your FSE? The answer is yes, it can be one of the most effective things to use in order to get a good mark.

If a teacher is not around to give their opinion and you have questions as to how something should be pull out the handy dandy rubric and look over the grading process and expectations of the teacher. By following along with the grade you most want to obtain (shooting for the moon) you can easily fit your FSE to the standards of the teachers. Don’t forget to use any of the tips or advice a teacher tells you since they have the power of the mark. Teachers may seem very tricky and complex, but what they want is simple and straightforward so don’t be afraid to ask questions because questions that aren’t asked don’t get answered.