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Why your Good Intentions and Hard Work mean Nothing

Summary Keywords

parents, kids, questions, work, test, osi, strategy, delivering, child, tutoring centers, ga, wm g, trial, terms, good intentions, hour, exam, college, number, volume, selective test

Speaker

Steve Xu

Transcript

selective-school:-selective-test-and-oc-test-parents
Steve Xu 00:00

Hey, parents! Welcome to the group. Thank you. I hope everyone is having a great day. So again, I just want to check in real quick. Every single day, I’m going to be recording a very short video just to help you guys understand a little bit more about selective schools tests. Today’s topic is why good intentions and hard work means absolutely nothing. So, recently, I’ve been getting a lot of messages from parents, and you know, a lot of really well meaning messages. I’ve been talking to a lot of parents lately, who’ve told me pretty much the same thing. It goes along the lines of this: Hey, Steven, you know what, I’ve been preparing my kid really, really well, really hard. We’ve been doing trial test papers at home, I’ve been sending him to multiple selective schools or opportunity class schools, maybe a trial test here, and a … class there. And just seems like it’s not working right? My kids always stuck at 60-70%, mark, and Steven, I do not know what to do. I get this question over and over again, it’s always the same. It’s like, my child just got 180 or 190, or low 200 in the OC test. 

I’m just wondering, you know, I once had this dream of getting my child into James Ruse or Baulkham Hills. Now that dream seems like it’s lost. I told the parents the same thing. I’m like, hard work and good intentions doesn’t mean anything, right? They’re all like, Steven, I work so hard, you know, I always make sure that my kids are doing work, I always come home, and I make sure that the kids are doing work, I just kind of push my kids to do I kind of like, it doesn’t mean anything. At the end of the day, everybody, and most of the parents here will be sending their kid to at least one selective school or opportunity class school, right? So already, if everybody, think about it, if there are 5000 kids who get tutored for the selective schools tests, and they all go to the same big man selective schools, what advantage do you have over the other kids? Question is or the answer is you have no advantage at all, right? 

selective-schools-selective-test-and-oc-test

So it’s not enough just to go to a selective school test or a WMG course and say, hey, you know what, I’m working hard, because you’re not. The thing, the metric that you should really be calculating, and I had a chat yesterday with one of the parents is, again, what is the strategy? Number one, what is the strategy? Number two, what is the actual quantity of work that you get done? Also, how many questions do you actually correct? So let me explain what I mean by this concept. If you go to a selective test, or if you go to a WMG course, what typically happens is you go in, let’s just say selective test, you go into a big name selective test, you do a full selective test, you do a full oc test, your child’s done, they spend, they spend about two and a half hours doing the oc test. Then once they’re done, they go through some brief explanations, whatever mistakes that your child make last week, they’re going to make again this week, right, and the process continues. 

So usually kids will improve to a point where they get back maybe 60 or 70%, and they’ll cap off, and they’ll stop improving. Parents would be like seeing what happened, that they’re doing work. You know, they’re coming home and they’re reading books, they don’t, like doesn’t matter. The question is when they come home from the selective test when they come home from the WMG course, how many questions are they doing every single day? You guys have seen in the posts that I posted kids who get 250 plus or, you know, two years ago, we had a, we had a girl who got 277 and came first in the state in OC test. The reason why she got that was again, because she put in the work at home. So how many questions? My question to you right now as parents is, how many questions are you making your kid do at home every single day? If you’re saying, oh, yeah, they’re just doing 30 questions a day at home, it’s just simply not enough. You think that doing 30 questions a day for a week? A week, you might do about 210 questions? Is that enough to elicit an actual result? The answer that is obviously not. 

The difference, think about it like this way, the difference between Olympic swimmers and normal swimmers is that Olympic swimmers do the same action of swimming six hours a day, whereas normal swimmers do that for like half an hour a day, right? Or even less. So that’s really the only difference is how many questions are you doing? Right? Because what the volume of questions does is number one, it builds your timing, your speed and number two, it builds the capacity to understand different types of questions. So what I typically recommend for my kids is on at least 150 questions every single day. You heard me correct 150 questions every single day. And that should take you approximately three to four hours, including the correction time. Right. So for a lot of you out there who are currently sending your kids to selective schools or to whatever, number one, you’re probably wasting your time and your money, right, because selective schools or opportunity class don’t do anything but assess where your child’s at. That’s pretty much it. 

WASTED MONEY!

After that, the rest of it is just wasted wasted money even even for me the classes that are run on Saturday and Sunday are great in terms of delivering accountability. But in terms of the amount of teaching that you can actually do in a two and a half or three hour lesson is very minimal. That’s why you have the online course. Alright. The other thing that you need to keep in mind is how much work you do on a home. If you just come, if kids just come to my course, and they just listened to me talk and they go home and they don’t do any work. It’s kind of like saying, like the analogy that I make is it’s like a fat person watching exercise videos all day long and not exercise. Right? A fat person who watches exercise videos all day long and doesn’t exercise is not going to make any any fat loss, right? They’re not going to make any progress. So again, you guys got to be asking yourselves are you doing 150 questions per day?

Steve Xu 04:54

Are you doing 150 questions per day? If you’re not doing that, then quit going to your selective schools or opportunity class because you’re just wasting your time and your money. You’re wasting both. Second thing is, what is your strategy? Like, when they do 150 questions, great, once they start doing 150 questions a day, that’s great. But again, what is your strategy? Are they, how are they going to correct those questions that they get wrong? In English and writing, how- what is your strategy going to be in terms of upping their reading comprehension, to make sure that they don’t make the same mistakes over and over again? Because that’s really the biggest problem that you guys have is maybe sometimes you have pushed your kids to do a lot of questions, and what’s happened is your kids come like, mom, dad, I don’t know how to solve these questions. I don’t know how to fix these- fix these answers. 

So there’s no point doing 150 questions every single day and get the same mistakes wrong, right? That’s like a hamster on a hamster wheel. It doesn’t make any sense either. So you kind of need the volume and you need the right teaching, and you need the right strategy. So then, as parents, again I say, you guys need to make sure that you up your commitment as parents, that’s the only way that you’re gonna win this game. Like I said, yesterday, the kids who score 250 Plus, right, and there are many of them who score 250-260-270, right? Those kids have the best parents or parents who will sit them and make them and drill them in terms of doing these questions until they understand how to do that question. Right? They won’t just give up. A lot of parents give up when they can start crying a little bit. Kids start crying because they feel resistance, right? That’s a great thing, right? Like, I embrace that this whole process is going to be extremely difficult. 

Parents, STAND IN YOUR ZONE

You need to understand that as parents, you need to stand in your zone, and you need to say, you know what, you need to do this quarter of questions. Otherwise, honestly, it’s just a waste of time going to selective schools or opportunity class schools, because these selective schools won’t solve the problem, right? There’s no way in the world that you can develop a capacity for answering mathematics questions, right? Developing that speed without doing the questions themselves, right. There’s no way of shortcutting that. I’ve tried to figure out ways. I’ve tried to teach kids ways. I’ve tried to teach these kids strategies, but at the end of the day, your results depend on number one, the amount of questions you do. Number two, the amount of questions that you correct. Usually, a lot of parents who are very well-meaning will make the kids do a lot of work. Most of you right now are probably not even getting the volume done. So that’s number one thing, you need to make sure that you get the volume done. Number two, is make sure that they understand the question that they get wrong, right. 

That comes again, that having the right strategy, and that’s obviously very, very difficult to establish, you don’t have the right pitching methodology. But again, there’s still a lot of things that you guys can do as parents, even if you just follow the Facebook group and listen to the tips that I give, right? Just listen to it like write it, copy, copy phrases, don’t copy the whole sentences, don’t copy the whole thing, but copy phrases. English, analyze, break down words, right? It’s really simple maths, volume, volume, volume, rather plenty amounts books out there, most of them, okay. English and writing, unfortunately, not there, there aren’t many books. The maths, even GA, there are plenty of good books out there, right in terms of GA, right? Maybe not for the maybe not completely model to the latest selective test and oc test, but they’re still good and building up the capacity to at least score about 50 or 60. Right. So again, as parents, you guys have to understand that this is a very tough game, it’s not meant to be easy. If it was easy, everybody would get into James Ruse.

Yet, you got to ask yourself, how many? How many of your friends get into James Ruse? How many of your friends’ children, you might know, one you might know two, you might know a couple, right? But not many. The majority of you guys are still not getting into opportunity class schools or selective schools, right not being able to get into the top selective schools or private school scholarships that you want. Again, it comes down to how hard you- how far are you willing to push? And how much you know, as parents. That’s all it comes down to. How many questions you do. And obviously the corrections. 

See also: Why scoring 90% in the Selective Test is Not Enough

That’s pretty much it for me today. I hope you guys have learned something interesting er- have delivered some kind of value. Again, these are very harsh truths. But this is the truth. If you want to get into a top score, if you want to get into James Ruse, this is what you need to do. That’s it for me today. Hopefully you guys enjoy. And over the next few days again, I’m going to be delivering a whole bunch of content to you guys. A whole bunch of free materials that I’ll be releasing over the- over the span of the next week, I’m still thinking about the materials that I do want to release because again, I want to deliver the most amount of value to you guys without again developing a sense of dependency right for just random materials. So stay tuned for that. If you enjoy this video, comment down below and like always try to share this out as much as possible. Thank you guys and have a good day.

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