Learning is a Marathon, not a Sprint 

We live in a modern world where the faster, the better. We heavily rely on fast food and express delivery. We get annoyed or anxious when people don’t reply to our text or email within 10 minutes. Learning new skills or new concepts, however, need the opposite.  

Students remember new words and can develop their vocabulary by taking the time to look it up from the dictionary than searching for it online in one second. Similarly, those who take and organise their study notes retain more information than students who don’t. 

Learning is a continuous journey that takes time, persistence and effort. Eventually, there’s a moment when it all just clicks.  

Why is being persistence so hard these days? 

We have many students, who come to us and just want the answer to the practice tests, and if we try to explain step by step how to do them, they zone out completely.  

Unfortunately, we live in an overstimulated digital world, and it makes our ‘monkey mind ‘increasingly distracted, especially when things start to get hard.  

A lot of us learn like we browse reels. We need something new and exciting every 2 seconds. 

On the contrary, to master a skill, we need to repeat and drill the same thing many times until we’ve got it and be able to move to the next level. 

How to teach children to be more persistent and treat learning as a marathon 

Encourage them to learn deeply on what they like and for them to like what they learn. It could be learning a new sport or musical instrument. It doesn’t matter what they want to learn at first because it’s showing the same process of repeating and practising. Once they go through this journey, they will understand the importance of persistence and hard work. They go from a beginners’ level to finding a passion and enjoy doing it. 

Celebrate small milestones in their learning journey. It’s not about whether they get full marks or top their class, it’s about the effort they put it and the process and discipline of achieving the result. When students can feel proud of their hard work, they most likely want to keep learning and build towards other goals.