Exams. Most of our kids here at Leeds are close to finished this round of exams and you can see that they are ready to be done with this semester.
Shane teaches only high school kids so his last few weeks have been exceptionally busy with students coming in for exam review. Jessica currently has elementary students whereas I have a mix of elementary and secondary.
I love exam time. I get very excited about exam review sheets. For some bizarre reason,  I hoard these things.  I like how they break down a whole term into smaller units of study. They make studying seem easier because you can tackle one item at a time and not feel so overwhelmed.
I don’t remember getting review sheets when I was in high school. I do, however, remember making the best cheat sheet ever for chemistry 11. It was beautiful. We were allowed one sheet, double-sided. This was in 1993 so computers were not readily available or as user friendly as they are today. But we did have photocopiers! I wrote as neatly as possible and then photocopied each section and reduced its size when I photocopied it. By the time I was finished I had an amazing amount of hand written work shrunk down to the smallest size that I could still read. I must have had every definition, every equation, and every common element on that sheet. I was so proud of my ingenuity.
It is much easier to get the same result today. Shane’s students are all in math and science so they have been working away on their own cheat sheets. They are very impressive- neat, small, and perfectly clear.
No matter how the cheat sheets are made, I think they are actually great review tools. You must find the information, write it out, and review its value before it can be added to the sheet. By the time the exam comes around you have probably read every item dozens of times! So after spending agonising hours creating it, you may never even need the sheet. The wily teacher tricked you into exam review by letting you think you were getting away with “cheating.”
Best of luck to all the exam writers out there!