4 Tips on How to Study & Learn Your Course

Published: Wed, 09/13/17

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4 Tips on How to Study and Learn Your Course
Here are four important suggestions I have on how you should approach learning this course.
  1. Set up a DISTRACTION-FREE ZONE.  Every day, when you sit down to do homework, turn off the phone, turn off the music, turn off the TV, take out the ear buds, etc.  Practice focusing on nothing but the task in front of you.  Try to spend at least 30 minutes where you refuse to be distracted.  Try to increase the length of time you do this each day.  At least once a week, see if you can go 3 hours without any distraction.  This will help accustom you to the focus you need when writing an exam.  Don't be in a situation where you are compelled to reach out to your phone, or can't concentrate because there is no music to make you feel at home.  Many students add to their anxiety because an exam situation is so different from what their homework is like, so don't let that happen to you.

  2. Set yourself clear goals each week.  For example, decide what lesson in my book you are going to study and attempt to master each week (I will also direct you each week in my tips as to what lesson you should study in order to prepare for a current assignment).  If you have a goal, then you can devote the time to achieve the goal.  Maybe you end up thoroughly learning the lesson in one day of study, and you can reward yourself with a few days off from math.  If the lesson is proving difficult to learn, you can parcel it out over a few days of study.  It is better to take a break if the information is evaporating the minute you read it because you just can't think straight, than wasting another hour or two getting nowhere.  Often, after a rest or diversion, something makes a lot more sense than it did initially.

  3. Do not treat your hand-in assignments (if you have any) as "open book", and do not start working on them too soon.  That is a ticket to disaster in a course.  I suggest you don't even start working on your assignment until about three days before it is due.  Prior to that, focus on studying the appropriate lesson in my book.  You can then supplement my lessons by studying the appropriate material from your class notes and textbook if you wish, trying to achieve a full understanding of the concepts.  Treat your assignments as a test of your knowledge.  Your goal is to be able to do 80% or more of an assignment without any assistance whatsoever.  If you achieve this goal, you will build confidence.  In addition, you will find you often need no more than an hour or two to do the assignment.  Students who, instead, decide to "learn" how to do the questions while working on the assignment will frequently spend 10 to 15 hours doing the assignments, and will actually learn very little.  Instead, they have temporarily learned it just to get the assignment over with.  A constant refrain I hear is, "I don't get it.  I was getting such good marks on my assignments, but I bombed the exam."  That is because students have never treated the assignments as tests of their knowledge and have papered over the cracks in their understanding.

    Of course, many of you probably won't have hand-in assignments.  That demands even more focus and commitment from you.  Treat the homework I assign at the end of each lesson like a hand-in assignment.  At first, you may need to look at my solutions to help you understand how to solve the problems.  Don't be satisfied with that.  Once you think you understand a problem, come back to it the next day, and see if you are now capable of doing it without assistance.  Again, your goal is to be able to do at least 80% of my homework problems without assistance in any given lesson.

  4. Pick a day in the week that will be your Review Day and stick to it.  On that day, go through all of your old assignments (starting with the most recent and working backwards) and test yourself.  Do you still know how to do the questions?  Maybe even redo some of the questions if you think they will be a good workout.  Obviously, if you don't remember how to do a question, go back and learn how.  Also, go through my Practise Problems again, picking some questions to test yourself with.  A good idea might be to circle particular questions (let's say at least 10) in each of my Lessons that you found particularly interesting or challenging when you first studied that lesson.  Then, each week when you do your review, test yourself on those questions again.  If you review on a weekly basis, you will not have to cram in a bunch of info a couple of days before your exam.