Hi all,
Forgive me if this post seems long, I tried to make it as short as possible by removing any unnecessary details, and leaving only the things needed. It would really mean so much to me if you would be able to read all of it to better understand my position, but if you're unable to read all of it, just jump to the Training Regime section.
Ok, here's the thing. I'm preparing myself for the college entrance exam, and I hope that 6 months of intensive study regime will be enough time for me to pass it. I would like your opinion on it to see if there is anything I would need to change
The entrance exam (July, 1st) is only 10 math-based questions from a random selection of topics listed here (the ones marked with a '?' are topics that I'm not sure if I translated well)
There is unfortunately, one huge problem with this whole thing, and those are my math skills.
ABOUT ME
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I won't bother posting too much of my background info just to be able to keep this thread short, but the only thing that I will say is that unfortunately throughout high school, I had a series of many, many bad events happening in my life leading me to the "downward spiral" and soon enough to a deep depression which caused my grades to drop heavily (from B to E (or whatever is the minimum passing grade at schools in the US)), and unfortunately math was never the topic I was interested in before and after depression hit.
Most of the time in school I always thought about math as that one subject where you won't need anything more than basic arithmetic and geometry in your life, so unfortunately I never paid much attention to it in class and just memorized the formulas and "templates" enough for it to be a passing grade.
Because of this, my math skills have suffered severely, and I plan to make it up to myself since now I'm looking towards entering college and I'm hoping I can hone my skills enough to pass the exam
TRAINING REGIME
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Since my memory of math is pretty weak, I decided to go on KhanAcademy and see how far I can go without failling. These are the results:
Kindergarten to 4th grade - Too easy, everything completed 100%
5th and 6th grade - Here I can see that there are holes in my knowledge, but I covered most of it
7th and 8th grade - Really foggy here, I need to repeat the majority of this stuff
High School - I failed everything
Now, here's the thing. All those topics that were listed in the above PasteBin link are the topics that I need to study for the exam, and what I'm curious about that is:
Is 6 months enough time to study all those topics listed above, even with knowledge as bad as mine?
Here's my study plan:
Starting from January, I'm going to go and repeat everything from 5th - 8th grade (this is mostly because I believe that if my fundamentals are bad, the rest will fall easily)
My study resources will comprise mostly of:
KhanAcademy
PatrickJMT
Professor Leonard (YouTube)
MIT OpenCourseWare
BONUS: Worksheets found on the internet for homework
My study will consist of 6-8 hours a day, 6x per week (1 - 1.5 hours of this will be spent on 'theory', that is, when I'm learning a new concept, I first want to try and understand it; like what does this concept represent, when do I use it, how do I apply it in X or Y situation, what it's all about, etc...) (rest of the hours will be spent on practicing and doing worksheets for that topic I just learned, and the previous ones)
More than 8 hours is something I don't think I'll be able to accomplish, just to avoid the feeling of "burnout". Of course, I don't plan on spending these hours all at once, what I meant was something like 3 in the morning/afternoon, 3-5 in the evening just before bedtime. I'll also use the Pomodoro Technique for better time management.
Starting from February, I'll also include a private tutor
Since the goal here is accelerated learning. With a private tutor, I was thinking of scheduling tutoring once a week, so that we can go through all of the things I learned that week, to see if I learned everything correctly, if I can do any homework assignment without help, to clear things up in case I was stuck somewhere, or didn't knew how to solve a problem, etc...
The lessons will be scheduled once a week from February up to May. In May and June, I'll start scheduling tutoring 3 times a week and I hope we can go through all of the topics listed above and fill any holes that I have. Most importantly to practice together, A LOT!
And that's about it for my study plan. Let me know what you think about it.
I know all of this seems a bit excessive, but this is just for that small hope that I have that I will succeed at entering college this year, and to be honest, even with all of this, I still have some form of anxiety that's telling me this won't be enough to study all those things in such a short period of time, and that I should give up on trying this year, and go for the next :\
I really want to succeed this year, but if skipping another year is necessary, then I'd rather do the right thing.
I would really like to hear what you guys think about all of this.
Thanks in forward, and forgive me again for the long post.
