Studying
Advices to self
- Eat that frog
- Pick the vital 20%
- Breaking a job down makes it more achievable
- WWSMAND?（这是啥）
- 1. “Studying” is not the same thing as “doing homework”!
- 2. Manage Your Time
- Priority: Your education should come first!
- Not Study Enough？
- Assume that your education is a full-time job, you should spend about 40 hours/week.
- 3. Taking Notes in Class & Rewrite Them at Home
- 3.2. Take Complete Notes
- Reasons:
- It will force you to pay attention to what’s going on in class.
- It will keep you awake!
- There will be less that you’ll have remember.
- Should you concentrate on taking notes or understanding?
- Prefer taking notes! (I’m surprised!)
- Understanding can come later when you review your notes.
- Incomplete notes will make it hard to learn what you didn’t take notes on.
- 3.3. Use Abbreviations
- Make it easy to take complete notes.
- 3.4. Neatness Doesn’t Count
- Be legible enough to be able to read your notes a few hours later.
- Because you will rewrite notes in the evening or later.
- 3.5. Ask Questions & Make Comments
- Ask your question right now?
- You’d better jot it or comment down in notes.
- Because you won’t forget it and can alway bring it up later.
- 3.6. Copy Your Notes at Home
- Just (re-)reading them is too passive, and won’t help.
- Study you notes by re-writing them.
- 3.7. Don’t Take Notes on a Computer
- Typing might disturbing to your fellow students.
- Have a firmer grashp of what I write if I handwrite it than I type it.
- You can re-write notes on a computer so that you can easy to search them.
- 3.8. Don’t Rely on the Instructor’s Lecture Notes
- Just reading it is passive.
- It’s beeter to re-writing them.
- Or compare it with yours.
- 4. Studying Hard Subjects First & Study in a Quiet Place
- Do hard subjects first for which need you to be alert and energetic.
- Quiet: Do not listen to music for you can’t “multitasking”!
- When should you study?
- As soon as possible and !
- Make you have enough time to finish it.
- You might have little time to play. Don’t complainn!
- Take it serious! Assume that studying is a full time job!
- 5. Read Texts Actively & Slowly, before & after Class
- 5.1. Read Actively, Not Passively
- Don’t read without thinking. Or you will fall asleep, ZZZ…
- 5.2. Read Slowly
- 「 An undeniable truth: that in the pursuit of knowledge, slower can be better. 」
- An algorithm for how to read:
- WHILE there is a next sentence to read, DO:
- Read it, SLOWLY
- IF you do not understand it, THEN:
- re-read the previous material, SLOWLY
- re-read the incommprehensible sentence, SLOWLY
- IF you still don’t understand it, THEN:
- ask a fellow student to explain it
- IF you still don’t understand it, THEN:
- ask your Teaching Assistant (TA) to explain it
- IF you still don’t understand it, THEN:
- IF you are in a upper-level course & still don’t understand it, THEN:
- write a paper about it (!)
- Why use it?
- It forces you to actively think about each sentence you read before you go on to the next on.
- It slows you down, so that you don’t read past the point at which you don’t understand.
- It can help you get help from your teacher, because you can show them where you get lost.
- An opportunity to interact with your instructors and fellow students!
- 「 How do you know whether you understand what you’ve read? Easy: After each sentence, ask yourself “Why?” 」
- 5.3. Highlight the Text in the Margin
- Worst
- Use a yellow marker (or any color you like).
- You tend to find almost every sentence to be important or interesting.
- So if everything has been highlighted, then really nothing has been!
- Even destory your pages of your text.
- It’s also bad to use a pen or a pencil to underline.
- Suggestion
- Draw a vertical line ‘]’ in the margin.
- So that you can re-read the text, highlight different passages each time.
- e.g.
- Or use a pair of small square brackets in the text.
- e.g. [ exactly where the highlighted passage begins or ends ]
- This way
- Even if you’ve made a highlighting error, at least you haven’t ruined the page.
- Moreover, when re-reading, you can use another technique to highlight more important passages.
- Or you will use double brackets in the margin for the second round of highlighting.
- 5.4. Make Notes in the Margin
- Put cross-references in the margin.
- e.g., if a passage on p. 20 reminds me in some way of passage on p. 10, I’ll write
see p. 20 in the margin of p. 20, and see p. 10 in the margin of p. 10. Or put some keywords in the margin, if a passage reminds me of some major idea.
- Make a index of my marginal comments, and add entries (e.g., Consciousness: 10, 20) to book’s index
- Or use a blank page at the end of the book if it doesn’t have an index.
- After a long time, you don’t need to page through the book till you find something
- 5.5. Keep a NoteBook
- Disadvantages
- Highlighting leads you to highlight everything.
- Margins are often too small for making comments.
- Best
- A notebook with a full citation to the text for use in a bibligraphy.
- Write down:
- the page numbers of each message that you copy.
- your comments on the passage at length and in detail.
- Number you notes:
- Number each notebook page with a Roman numberal (I, II, etc)
- Number each quoted passage (or stand-alone comment) with an Arabic numeral (1, 2, etc.)
- Letter (a, b, etc.) each comment associated with a quoted passage (or stand-alone comment)
- Then you can refer to each passage with a identifer (like XIV-7-b, i.e., comments b about quotation 7, which comments is located on notebook page XIV)
- 5.6. Read Literature Quickly and Passively the First Time.
- An exception to this method of slow and active reading:
- If the text is a work is a work of literature (a story, novel, play, poem, etc.),
- it is often best to read it once all the way through without stopping, so that you get to know what it’s about and can appreciated it.
- What about film or video version of a work of literature?
- No substitute for reading (The exception here is for plays).
- If you do decide to watch in addition to read, which should you do first?
- I prefer for watching first, reading afterwards.
- Because I have always been disappointed by film adaptations of favourite texts (because they don’t match the mental images that I construct when I read)
- 5.7. Read Before and After Class
- Read Twice
- Read a text before class, perhaps quickly, so that you are familiar with its content.
- Then (re-)read it after class using the slow and active method.
- If time permits, you can cut corners by only reading it - slowly and actively - after class.
- 6. Do Your Homework
- The reasons why are obvious.
- Do them on scrap paper, check them over, and then copy them neatly.
- In case the teacher loses it or doesn’t give it back in time to use it for studying for an exam.
- Don’t just write down answers.
- Write down the problem and the complete solution showing how you arrived at your answer.
- 7. Study for Exams
- 7.1. Don’t Study for Exams!
- You should study “for learning and understanding“
- But here are some suggestions if you want to study for exam.
- 7.2. Manage Your Time
- First Rule: Don’t Cram
- Begin studying about 1 week before the week.
- Spend at least an hour each night (or day) studying for the exam in the manner described below.
- Try to Spend the entire night (and/or day) before the exam studying for it.
- If you have two exams on the same day, split the time in half.
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