study skills Articles

Well, well! I have increased my workload again and I love it. My new WyzAnt tutoring is going very well. I especially enjoy the freedom that WyzAnt presents both tutors and students. I seem to work best -- and have the best results with clients -- when we can both very specifically adapt the program to the individual situation. I look forward to posting pertinent items from the web as well as my musings on education. Of course, all client meetings are held in strictest confidence and will never be posted unless agreed upon by all parties. Hard work is fun!

Forgoing sleep is a bad idea. Sure, you get those extra hours of studying or writing right now, but you pay in spades later: You destroy your creativity, morale, and attitude.

Once in a while, you can pull an all-nighter if you fully understand the consequences. Just don't make it a habit. If it becomes a constant, the costs start to mount:

Stubbornness: When you're really tired, it always seems easier to plow down whatever bad path you happen to be on instead of reconsidering the route. The finish line is a constant mirage and you wind up walking in the desert way too long.

Lack of creativity: Creativity is one of the first things to go when you lose sleep. What distinguishes people who are ten times more effective than the norm is not that they work ten times as hard; it's that they use their creativity to come up with solutions that require one-tenth of the effort. Without sleep, you stop coming up with those one-tenth solutions.

Diminished morale: When your brain isn't firing on all cylinders, it loves to feed on less demanding tasks. Like checking your e-mail/Facebook/Twitter accounts, making meaningless lists, or aimlessly paging through your textbooks. When you're tired, you lose motivation to attack the big problems.

Irritability: Your ability to remain patient and tolerant is severely reduced when you're tired. If you encounter someone who's acting like a fool, there's a good chance that person is suffering from sleep deprivation. Frustration is the enemy of anyone who is having difficulty studying for a course.

These are just some of the costs you incur when not getting enough sleep. Yet some people still develop a masochistic sense of honor about sleep deprivation. They even brag about how tired they are. Don't be impressed. It'll come back to bite them in the butt.

This is a message to all the tutees out there looking for last minute assistance in their studies. My advice to you all who wish to maximize your performance in your classes is this: hire your tutors early.

I’ve noticed that the availability of tutoring jobs increases on WyzAnt near the end of the summer and at the end of the semesters as well. The beginning of the semester however, deadpans for tutoring business. I expect the number of jobs to increase as the semester moves on.

You may be thinking, “If I study for an exam too early, I’ll forget the basics before the exam rolls around.” If you’re concerned that your brain has a limited capacity, don’t fret; you have the ability to retain all the information you’ve ever encountered, but be forewarned. It does have a gestation period. I’ve seen jobs posted on this website saying, “I need a tutor ASAP for my exam tomorrow!” At this point you’re pretty much a lost cause. Your efforts will be too little too late, and you’ll have wasted your money, your stress, and your time.

You should find a tutor at the first sign of struggle in a particular subject or in study habits in general. You will see much greater success and long-term results. Consider it an investment. Cramming for a subject is like cramming for a test. You’ll learn a small bit of the material for the short-term, and then quickly forget the information when you don’t need it anymore. This is especially problematic if your studies build upon each other with each successive class—like mathematics or grammar.

Tutors don’t have any magic wands. We can’t give you an academic panacea. And it’s difficult to fix a semester’s worth of mistakes and misunderstandings in the last few weeks before you need the information. Knowledge takes time to digest. You have to make it mean something significant to you.

Those “Aha!” moments are always fun, but let’s face it, they are rare, and epiphanies can be lost in the brain fog unless supported and reiterated by further study. Most other bits of knowledge require lots of time and pontification to actually carry any weight in your psyche. So if you have any inkling that you’ll need help in a subject in the future (by the end of the semester, for example), hire a tutor now. You’ll be glad you did.

Sometimes copying can be part of the learning process, like when you see an art student replicating a painting in a museum or a drummer playing along to John Bonham's solo on Led Zeppelin's "Moby Dick". When you're a student, this sort of imitation can be a helpful tool on the path to discovering your own voice.

Unfortunately, copying is usually more nefarious. Maybe it's because of the copy-and-paste world we live in these days. It's too easy to steal someone's words, images, or thoughts instantly. And that means it's tempting to take shortcuts in your education by being a copycat.

That's a formula for failure, though. The problem with this sort of copying is it skips understanding--and understanding is how you grow. You have to understand why something works or why something is the way it is. When you just copy and paste, you miss that. You just repurpose the last layer instead of understanding all the layers underneath.

If you're a copycat, you can never keep up. You're always in a passive position. You never lead; you always follow. You give birth to something that's already behind the times--just a knockoff, an inferior version of the original. That's no way to live.

How do you know if you're copying someone? If someone else is doing the bulk of the work, you're copying. Be influenced, but don't steal.

Watch chef Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares and you'll see a pattern. The menus at failing restaurants offer too many dishes. The owners think making every dish under the sun will broaden the appeal of the restaurant. Instead it makes for crappy food (and creates inventory headaches).

That's why Ramsay's first step is nearly always to trim the menu, usually from thirty-plus dishes to around ten. Think about that. Improving the current menu doesn't come first. Trimming it down comes first. Then he polishes what's left.

When studying for exam or preparing for a difficult course, the natural inclination is to throw more at the problem. More time, more books, more study guides. All that ends up doing is making the problem more daunting. The right way to go is the opposite direction: Cut back.

So do less. Your coursework won't suffer nearly as much as you fear. In fact, there's a good change it'll end up even better. You'll be forced to figure out the concepts that truly matter.