Exercise and meditation help matrics prepare

While most matric pupils are burning the midnight oil in the final countdown to exams on Tuesday, Nondumiso Gwala is consumed with exercising.

The Grade 12 pupil at Inkamana High School in Vryheid says exercise is helping to prepare her mind for the crucial exams taking place over the next month.

Apart from training twice a day, the 17-year-old girl from KwaMashu township in Durban says she is also praying “big time”.

“You have to relax and try not to stress a lot. You know you’ve been doing your work throughout the year,” she says. “Most people stress a lot and focus on stress more than what they should do.”

Her fellow pupil, Thabile Zuma, 18, from Oribi in Pietermaritzburg, prefers meditating and drinking black tea to boost her energy and concentration levels.

“But I’m more of an indoor person. During the holidays I spend most of the time doing my assignments and revisions so that I can understand the things I didn’t understand previously,” she says.

Gwala and Zuma have two things in common: they are more than ready for the exams and they both hope to pass with flying colours.

Their optimism may not be far-fetched if their school’s reputation for outstanding academic achievement is anything to go by.

Inkamana is renowned throughout the country for academic excellence: last year the school achieved a 100% pass rate for the 27th consecutive year. The school’s 26 matriculants all bagged matric exemptions too.

This year only 22 pupils will sit for the final year matric examination and the school is expected to achieve the same result as the previous years.

For the principal of this farm school, Isobel Steenkamp, the secret of their success is proper utilisation of available time during the year.

“We start from day one, using every minute for educational time. We take a lot of stress off our children and that’s one of our tricks.” Another trick up Steenkamp’s sleeve is her emphasis on developing the students’ life skills.

“Our emphasis is not just on academic performance because we believe that, if you develop the whole person, everything will fall into place,” she says.

Steenkamp, who has been at the school since 1982, says their focus on life skills prepare the pupils well for tertiary education. “We believe that, by helping them to get skills to manage life, they can manage their studies. We also try very hard to help students in their personal lives. We believe it doesn’t help to develop the brain and leave the person behind.”

Steenkamp takes the view that the Department of Education could play a major role in helping students develop “as a whole person and emotionally”.

“As a farm school we make a difference to SA society with the quality of students we produce. A school can be proud of its record when its former students are successful and coping in the working environment, ” says Steenkamp.

source: thetimes.co.za