Q: For the first 24 hours after your injury it’s important to have someone stay with you to make sure your symptoms are not getting worse. Your caregiver should be someone who knew you before the injury so that they are familiar with your baseline personality and thinking patterns. If your symptoms worsen at all, your caregiver should take you to the hospital or call for emergency medical assistance.  While you sleep during those first 24 hours, your caregiver should wake you up every 1-2 hours to check on your symptoms. You should be able to wake up normally. They can ask you what your name is, what state you live in, or what day of the week it is to ensure you aren’t getting confused. Neurological checks every 2 hours is important in the course of treatment and care. Despite popular belief, it’s okay to sleep when you have a concussion. You will likely require more sleep than usual as your brain recovers. Sleep is a great way to rest your brain right after your injury as well as throughout the next several weeks, so continue to nap throughout the day if you need to. If possible, take time off of work or school or find childcare so that you can rest for up to two weeks. Rest truly is the only medicine for a concussion, and the more you can rest after your injury the more quickly you will recover. Enlist family, friends or hired help to ease your burden for several weeks. You may be very sensitive to sounds and light after a concussion, and will likely be more comfortable keeping still than moving around. Your brain needs rest in order to heal, and this includes rest from stimulus. Lie in a quiet room with closed blinds or a towel over your eyes as much as you can.  Do not try to read, text, or watch TV to pass the time. This stimulates your brain. True brain rest requires calm, quiet, stillness, and minimal brain activation. Avoid activities that raise your heart rate, like fast walking or lifting weights. No matter what you do, you may have post-concussion symptoms beginning a few days after your injury and lasting up to 2-3 weeks. Some people experience post-concussion symptoms for months. Symptoms may include dizziness, headaches, and difficulty concentrating. Some people also develop emotional symptoms like depression, which can last for several weeks to months.  Once a concussion has been sustained, you cannot prevent further symptoms. Rest as much as you can. Be patient and know that this is a normal part of the process. Headaches may not develop until weeks or months after a head injury. This can be an uncomfortable and challenging time. In order to focus on your recovery, try to keep your stress to a minimum. Meditate daily and try mindfulness exercises. Do deep breathing techniques. Give yourself a hand massage. Do whatever calming, non-strenuous activities you enjoy. If you have a headache, it’s okay to take products like Tylenol that use the ingredient acetaminophen. This may alleviate some discomfort.  However, do not take Advil, Motrin, or anything containing ibuprofen or aspirin – this could increase the risk of bleeding in your brain. If you have any remaining symptoms of concussion whatsoever, do not do anything that may cause further brain injury. Avoid riding a bike, playing sports, going on roller coasters – anything that may injure or jostle your brain. Second impact syndrome is caused when you get another concussion before the first heals, and it can cause fast and potentially fatal swelling of your brain. The term” second impact syndrome” is used when there is diffuse brain swelling after a second impact to the head. Your response time and ability to focus may be impaired after a concussion, which can make driving dangerous. Avoid driving until your symptoms improve. Speak with your doctor about your symptoms and whether it’s safe for you to drive, ride a bike, or use heavy equipment.
A: Have a caregiver with you for 24 hours. Sleep as much as you want to. Set aside two weeks to rest. Minimize light, noise and movement. Prepare for some discomfort. Use self-calming techniques. Take acetaminophen for pain, not aspirin or ibuprofen. Do NOT injure your head again while you still have concussion symptoms. Be careful when driving.

Q: There is nothing worse than getting a question marked as incorrect simply because the teacher couldn’t read your handwriting. Remember that your teacher has many tests to grade, so the less time s/he has to spend grading your test, the happier s/he will be and this might reflect in his or her grading choices.   For example, drawing spaghetti-line intersecting lines from column A to column B is likely to be marked down by a teacher who also has 74 other tests to mark. Similarly, print don't write; you don’t want to get something marked wrong just because the teacher can’t decipher your sloppy handwriting. Don't make your Ts look like Fs; spell out True and False. You might get partial credit, if you did everything right but just made a silly mistake right at the end. Partial credit is always better than no credit. So show your work as you go so your teacher can see that you know at least some of the material and got it right. This step is only useful for solving math questions on an exam. Keep a rhythm of underlining words you don't know and circling questions that you get stuck on. Never come to a complete halt – you should always be writing, reading, or turning a page.  The important thing is not to get frustrated and just quit. You only have a limited amount of time, so you need to make every moment count. If you struggle with a particular problem or section, skip it! You can always come back to it later. And this way you’ll be making the most of your time to ensure you get through the entire test. A good rule of thumb to follow when writing an essay for an exam is the rule of three. It usually works better to discuss (or list or...) three things about the subject. Include many more and you get bogged down in too much detail. Any fewer and you are probably leaving something important out. It is important to move through the test in a way that will benefit you and make the most of the time you have. Don’t just start the test and hope you finish in time. If you have both multiple choice and essay questions, do this:  Read the essay questions first. Write down any notes, but, do not answer them yet. Begin answering the multiple choice questions. While you are doing so, your brain will be gathering information contained in these questions that will help you answer the essays. If needed, write brief notes that you can use later for the essays. Once you have all the multiple choice questions answered (and, you will have checked one box for each of them), then do the essay questions, beginning with the easiest. When it comes to multiple choice questions, it is always better to guess than to leave it blank. A blank answer is an automatic wrong answer, while a guess (especially an educated guess) gives you at least a chance at getting it right. Here are some tips for answering multiple choice questions:  The longest answer is usually the correct answer because the correct answer requires more qualifying language to be indisputably correct than the incorrect answers.  Answers that contain words like always or never are almost always incorrect because most truths don’t exist as absolutes. Try eliminating one or two answers that you know for a fact are wrong. There is almost always one answer that is obviously incorrect and then another one or two that you can guess about. Eliminating wrong answers will greatly increase your chances of guessing the right answer from the remaining choices. Pay attention to the answers of surrounding questions. Even randomly generated tests tend to not repeat answers often. So, if you know the answer to number 1 is A and the answer to number 3 is also A, it is highly unlikely that the answer to number 2 will be A as well.
A:
Make it easy for the teacher to grade your test. Show intermediate results. Go through the test steadily. Remember the rule of three. Work strategically. Answer multiple choice questions smartly.