Revision is a personal, individual process

Revision must be one of the most individualized processes within academic life. Students begin it with: different sets of knowledge and understandings; different responses to the stress of the revision and exam period; different preferred revision techniques; and different psychological and life contexts into which to fit the revision.

While it is possible to get ideas from others and from books, about how to revise, you also need to get to know what your own personal strengths and weaknesses are. How much do you already know? How do you revise? What are the factors that usually cause problems for you in managing your revision?

The following list may be useful in identifying combinations of contexts in which you prefer to revise.

Love at Exit 19

He was a tollbooth operator, she was a soprano who sang in Carnegie Hall. Their eyes met at Exit 19 of the New York State Thruway, when he charged her 37 ¢. The romance that followed was even less likely than the plot of an opera!

Sonya Baker was a frequent commuter from her home in the suburbs to New York City. One day, when she was driving to an audition. She came off the Thruway and stopped at the tollbooth where Michael Fazio was working. She chatted to him as she paid to go through, and thought he was cute. For the next three months, they used to exchange a few words as she handed him the money, and he raised the barrier to let her pass. It was mostly «What are you doing today? Where are you going?» she said. They learned more about each other, for example that Sonya loved Puccini and Verdi, while Michael's love was the New York Yankees. But their conversations suddenly came to an end when Michael changed his working hours. «He used to work during the day» said Sonya, «but he changed to night shifts». Although Michael still looked out for Sonya's white Toyota Corolla, he did not see her again for six months. When Michael's working hours changed back to the day shift, he decided to put a traffic cone in front of his lane. He thought, «It will be like putting a candle in a window». Sonya saw it, and their romance started up again. I almost crashed my car on various occasions, she said, trying to cross several lanes to get to his exit. Finally, she found the courage to give Michael a piece of paper with her phone number as she passed through the toll. Michael called her and for their first date they went to see the film Cool Runnings, and then later went to an opera, La Boheme, and to a Yankees game.

They are now married and living in Kentucky, where Sonya is a voice and music professor at Murray State College and Michael runs an activity centre at a nursing home. It turned out that she had given him her number just in time. A short while later she moved to New Jersey and stopped using the New York State Thruway. «I might never have seen him again», she said.

TCHAIKOVSKY'S HOUSE

In 1885 Tchaikovsky wrote to a friend, «These days I dream of settling in a village not far from Moscow where I can feel at home.»

First he rented a small house in the village of Maidanovo. But Maidanovo was too full of tourists in the summer and Tchaikovsky had too many visitors, when what he wanted was peace and quiet. Eventually he found the perfect house, in the small town of Klin. It was 85 kilometres northwest of Moscow and he lived there until his death on 6 November 1893. It is the place where he wrote his last major work, his 6^th Symphony, or the Pathetique as it is sometimes called.

It's a grey wooden house with a green roof. Tchaikovsky's servant Alexei lived on the ground floor, and the kitchen and dining room were on the first floor. Tchaikovsky himself lived on the second floor. The sitting room and study, where his piano is located, is the largest room in the house and there is a fireplace and a bookcase with his music books. His writing desk, where he wrote letters every morning after breakfast, is at the end of the room. But the place where he composed music was in his bedroom, on a plain, unpainted table overlooking the garden.

In his final years, Tchaikovsky's great love was his garden. It was not a tidy English – style garden, but more like a forest. He adored flowers, particularly lilies of the valley, and after his death, his brother Modest, who had decided to turn the house into a museum, planted thousands of lilies of the valley around the garden.

In 1971, after the Bolshevik revolution, an anarchist named Doroshenko lived there with his family. People say that he fired shots at the portrait of Pope Innocent hanging in one of the bedrooms. He was finally arrested in April, and the house became the property of the state.

Since 1958, the winners of the annual International Tchaikovsky Competition have all been invited to come to Klin to play his piano, and there is a tradition that each musician plants a tree in his garden in the hope that, like his music, it will remain beautiful forever

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