Study Hours in the First Semester and Textbooks Actually Used [From a GPA of 28 to a Tokyo Metropolitan Self-Created School: A Parent and Child's Record of Taking on High School Entrance Exams Without Cram School #8]

Tamaki started studying intensely from March of her second year of junior high school.

However, there were many gaps in her learning from the first and second years.

Today, I will write about how we filled those gaps to make it in time for the first semester final exams of the third year and managed to achieve a GPA of 40.

The biggest challenge was math.

Until then, she had always scored in the 60s on final exams, but in the first semester of the third year, she was able to score in the 90s for the first time.

That is an increase of about 30 points!

As for what we did...

We purchased the New Junior High School Problem Collection textbooks for the first and second years that were used at the cram school and started over from the first year. (You can also buy them on Amazon.)

Of course, we didn't do every single page.

We moved through the parts she could do at a good tempo and spent time repeating the units she was weak in.

And, Tamaki's tutor was...

YouTube teachers!

She had two favorite teachers for math,

and she would watch videos of the units she wanted to learn before doing practice problems.

She repeated this flow.

Around this time, Tamaki was recording her study hours with an app called Studyplus.

Looking back, just for math,

• March: 42 hours 9 minutes

• April: 53 hours 31 minutes

• May: 33 hours 51 minutes

Over the approximately three months from March to May, nearly 130 hours were spent studying.

Math is a cumulative subject.

Even if you only study the third-year curriculum, you cannot understand it without a foundation.

Although it may seem like a detour at first glance, I believe that starting over from the first-year material was the shortest path.

For other subjects, we focused on reviewing using the textbook titled "Summary of Junior High School" that we had purchased before quitting cram school.

Except for Japanese, it seems there was a favorite YouTube teacher for each subject,

"Understand through videos -> Practice with textbooks"

was the study style.

Looking back at Studyplus,

in the first semester, about 3 hours on average every day were spent studying.

This was while continuing club activities four days a week.

Looking back now, I really think they did their best.

As a result,

in the final exams, they came very close to the goal of 450 points in 5 subjects.

And then, July.

As a first test of ability, V-Mogi will be taken.

They are about to learn a reality that is completely different from regular school exams...

I will talk about those results next time.