How do you learn/study?

[Babar]

I have some minor tests coming up (starting on Tuesday) and I wanted to know about this. See, I used to be able to study pretty easily. In class while the teacher was explaining, I'd pick up the concepts. Once I picked up the concepts, they're stuck with me permanently. It is a quite a weird feeling, that. Like, instead of learning something, I just 'remembered' it, and now it is part of my brain function, and even though I might not have even known about it at all before, it is perfectly logical to me know. So then after having understood it, I could go home and do a few questions that day, one day a week later, or even just the day before a test, and still be able to solve them.

Nowadays, I am in trouble, because the first step is not happening anymore. I don't get it. Is it because stuff I learnt before was very easy, and this stuff is getting more complicated? I don't like to blame teachers, because even if they may be horrible at what they do, it is my business to learn, and I can't make excuses.

Even if the teacher is crappy, I attempt to study from the book, but even that doesn't get through. Either I go through the text and try picking up concepts (which takes too long, and by which time I don't have enough time to practice any questions) or I give it all up, and note down a few formulas and use them to practice questions until the formulas are somewhat remembered (which doesn't work so well either, when the questions in the tests are completely different from that in the book, or when the formulas haven't been remembered all that well).

It always ends up with me studying till 3am the night before an exam, at which point I sleep with the knowledge that I still don't 'know' what I am supposed to. Previously, I was able to sleep at 10pm, with while still being somewhat apprehensive about a test, I understood the concepts, or at least I still knew what things I was supposed to know.

Last night I got home about 4am, after which, although I was somewhat tired, I sat in bed and opened up my textbook and understood the first chapter of what I was supposed to do (something that would usually have taken until the last day). I solved one of the examples by myself, and then went to sleep. Although there are 3 more chapters to go through, it is something of a relief to at least be able to 'fit in' that piece with all the other pieces in my brain.

I really don't know what the problem is. It is true that I don't study as much as I should (a remnant of my old method of study, perhaps), but even when I open a book, it all seems to tedious, and is so hard to concentrate, and so impossible to comprehend, that I slap my book shut in annoyance about a minute through (and no, music or lack of music doesn't help, lighting is fine, my sitting position is okay).

It is pretty frustrating to be brought down to barely on average after being originally at the top of the group, and I keep looking at other students and thinking 'I can be as good as them, why aren't I being as good as them?!'. Of course, I have no intention of shutting myself into my room 18 hours a day and just pouring over the books (not that I'd be able to either, or that it would even help), which is what some of these students do, but I know (or maybe I wish?) I can be better.

Some subjects I am good at, but in a year there are maybe one or two of those subjects, and they barely keep me above water (programming stuff, the concepts of which I learnt a long time ago, or math which is rehashing old knowledge), but then there are some subjects that while I am in class, I am thinking 'why am I here? I literally cannot understand what he is on about, and from the looks of the other student, they seem to be able to'.

An example: Teacherguy draws a huge circuit on the board, and while I am mentally (or on paper) figuring out the gain, gm, feedback gain, the teacher and students are flying over these things as if it is a given. I realise that there are a lot of shenanigans involved in being a student, but I find those distasteful, and stay away from them, which puts me at a further disadvantage- Cosying up to the teachers, going to them about increasing 1 mark here in my test and 1 mark there because my mistake wasn't so bad, (the fact that the teacher probably wouldn't be able to put a name on my face, and keeps confusing me with other students is evident of this).

[RickJ]

Hi Babar,

I used to do that.  It worked  really well for me in High School, especially social studies and things like that.  But it didn't work so well for me with math in high school.   

When I was studying engineering at university what worked for me was to immediately go home and work the assigned problems.  I still paid attention in class and tried to gain an understanding of the concepts instead of taking detailed notes. 

The other thing that worked really well is that I transferred in to university after finishing a 2 year degree.   They didn't want to transfer a lot of stuff.  They said that they were on a semester system and that my former school was on quarters so when they did transfer credit they only transferred 2/3 assuming that quarters are shorter than semesters. In practice they are about the same.  At university they wasted time on mid-terms and finals, like they gave you a week with out home work for mid-terms and for finals they did the review 2 weeks before, and didn't do anyting the week before, and then the week of finals you were done in a couple of days.  In the quarter system they had unit tests every couple weeks.  The mid-term was just another unit test where 50% of it covered all topics from beginning of class.  You had regular classes the whole week, even in the one where there was a test.   The same was true for finals, except the class period before they did a review of the whole year. 

Anyway because of the way the stuff transferred I ended doing things like taking differential calculus and integral calculus in the same semester.   I already had "2/3" of differential calculus so that class was just like review.  But the interesting thing is that the differential calculus class helped me in the other calss and vice versa.  I did this with a number of classes and it was like taking almost the same class twice,.

Anyway, I hope you find something here that is helpful.

Cheers
Rick

[shbaz]

Sounds like maybe you need to study more?  Not sure what your major is, but seems like it might be the same as mine (electrical engineering).

The other students and the teacher aren't calculating the gains and etc in their head, they have an understanding of what's going on because of an intuitive idea of how all of the components work individually and thus together.  I can do this with some circuits, knowing that an op amp will oscillate about "this fast" with certain components, but before you get that kind of thing going on you've gotta look at and calculate or build dozens, if not hundreds, of that type of circuit.

Also, you really have to be interested.  If you're not really passionate about a subject it's many times more difficult for you than if you are.  The "smart" students in my classes are always the most enthusiastic, not necessarily the "smartest."

But hey, take it with a grain of salt, I have the same problems.. Everything is elementary at the beginning of the semester and so I take it easy, before I know it things have snowballed and I'm impossibly behind.  Happens every time too.

The rare times I've gotten to be buddies with my professors I've done lots better not because I was sucking up, but because they're really passionate about their subjects and they can easily explain things I don't understand yet, which puts me at a quick advantage when trying to grasp new concepts.  If an individual doesn't understand something in class, he usually stays quiet regardless.  If he's talking to a professor one on one, no one else is there to make him feel like he's wasting everyones time with the questions.

[Vlad]

Dear Fellow Student Brother in Suffering,

Your story has moved me deeply, for I had experienced something similar three years ago. I was but a 1st year student of English Bloody Everything (“English Philology” just sounds awkward) and my mind was filled with Pink Fluffy Clouds of Anticipation. Generally I was very excited about being a student.

One day I noticed that my difficulties with a certain horribly complicated linguistic subject are not shared by my collegues. It turned out that some of them found it childlishly easy. My heart, swollen with doubt like a small plastic bag of ketchup (the kind they give you in cheap restaurants), began to scream: “You do not belong here! DUMBASS!”

Fortunately I soon found out that many a poor soul had suffered similar doubts regarding other various subjects, those that I found pretty easy, and I learned that, in the eyes of my collegues, I excelled in some of them.

Soon I learned of the Sane Approach: concentrate on stuff you're good at and just try and pass the stuff you hate. When you chose your seminars, MA thesis etc, make sure you end up working with the topics you like. At least that's how it works here: you get lots of stuff in the first 2 years of your studies (the “general knowledge” that you're supposed to have), you decide what you're interested in and, during the course of the next 3 years, you thoroughly learn the stuff you picked. A nice 5-year academic experience.

At the moment (4th year) I'm enthusiastic about 80% of my classes, the other stuff (mostly things the Ministry of Education believes “every student should know” like Latin, Philosophy, 2nd Foreign Language) I just pass. I get good grades and I'm taking it easy.

There are people who end up learning stuff they're not very interested in, and there's always one or two highschool kids who think they should get fantastic grades in everything. Well, they have it tough.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

What I did in my EE courses was just to read the books like they were novels, cover to cover.  Even if I didn't completely understand something that was in the book, by the time the teacher got to the subject and covered it I had it in memory and could figure the rest out from the lecture or by asking questions.  The important thing is not to be afraid to ask questions if you don't understand something; you are paying this teacher to teach you, which gives you the right to question and otherwise bother him until you have a full understanding of the material.  Like any producer/consumer relationship, the quality of the product depends on, among other things, your willingness or unwillingess to be satisfied with the result.

[Pumaman]

Learning things definitely gets harder over time. Back when I were a lad, I could do 10 different subjects at school and have half a chance of remembering most of it.

But nowadays, I barely have the capacity to remember anything ... anything new I have to repeatedly read over and over again in order to have any chance of remembering it.

There are various techniques that people bang on about that supposedly make it easier to learn/remember stuff, but I think I've come to a point of acceptance where you just have to give up on learning new stuff and hope that the stuff you know already will get you through life. It's like going bald, really... just accept it and move on.

[Babar]

Thanks for the help everybody! I had my sessional today, and as expected, did pretty badly. Like I promise myself after every sessional, from now on I will study daily, I will study along the class. Maybe this time I will be able to keep that promise, and use the advice you all gave me.

[deadsuperhero]

I have a couple methods...

One for Acting
-Look at the script
-say the lines to yourself
-try to retype your lines in notepad or something like that, without looking too much at the script
-Do it until you remember the lines.

For studying, I:
-Go in and ask the teacher for help.
-Teacher shows me how to do something.
-I try it for myself, using the notes my teacher's written down.
And VOILA! I've got it memorized for whenever I need it.

Another way to go is to say important stuff into a tape recorder, and play it while you sleep.

[auriond]

For memorising things, I'm a visual person, so it helps to remember what the page of the book looked like, or to remember what the teacher looked like when he/she said something.

For actually understanding something, it helps to lay it all out - I usually tell my students to do mind-maps, but I'm personally a linear-understanding type. So my own notes tend to be in the form of lists. It does get in the way of seeing the big picture sometimes though.