How do other people study? I’m constantly vacillating between the ideas of taking notes and making flashcards, or just making flashcards. I’d like to study everything the same way, but it seems like for less technical subjects like philosophy making flashcards wouldn’t suffice and I’d need to take notes. For some reason the idea of taking notes for some subjects but not others is uncomfortable to me. And I’m also stuck between taking notes on the literature I read or just keeping a list. It’s getting to the point where I don’t even study or read anymore because I feel like I need to figure out the best way first.
Ideally I want to take no notes whatsoever and just make flashcards in Anki, since it’s quicker and I never look back at notes anyway, but I’m paranoid that I’ll be doing things sub-optimally. Does anyone have any suggestions for what to do? I mostly study math and science.
I believe that both making notes and making flashcards are suboptimal; the best (read: fastest) method I know is to read and understand what you want to learn, then close your eyes and recall everything in full detail (that is hard, and somewhat painful; you should try to remember something for at least few minutes before giving up). Re-read whatever you haven’t remembered. Repeat until convergence.
In math, it helps to solve problems and find counterexamples to theorem conditions, because it leads to deeper understanding, which makes remembering significantly easier. Also try to make as much connections to already known facts and possible applications as possible: our memory is associative.
If possible, I like to allocate full attention to listening to the lecturer instead of dividing it between such and taking notes. However, this isnt always feasible. It helps if there is a slidepack or something similar that will be avaliable afterwards. Most of the time, I’m trying to build a mental construct for how all of the things that I’m learning fit together. Depending on the difficulty of the material, I may need to begin creating this construct pretty soon so I can understand the material, or it may be able to wait until pretty close to the exam. (If I’m not having to take notes, I can start doing it in class, which is more efficient and effective.)
I try to fill in the gaps in my mental model with a list of questions to ask in office hours. In the process, the structure of the material becomes a bit more evident. Is it very interconnected, either in a logical or physical sense? Is it something that seems to be made of arbitrary facts? If the latter, and the material is neither interesting nor useful nor required, I will be tempted to drop the class. If it is interesting or useful, facts stick much better, as I can think about how I can use them, how they help me understand things in such a manner that I can more easily affect them. Not sure that I personally have found many classes interesting but not useful if they lack a structure. If neither, but required, I prefer creating a structure that helps me link things together in a way that will help me remember them. A memorable example was committing a picture of the amino acid table to memory and then stepping through it vertically, horizontally, diagonally to make it stick. A structure that can be useful here is to repeat all past memorized items when memorizing a list. So A, then AB, then ABC, and so on.
I like pictures, lists, and cheat sheets (often worth making for me to help memtal organization even if I can’t take them into a test) for the facts that don’t fit in my mental model, or just as redundancy. Otherwise, I tend to mainly do things by trying to get an understanding of the relationships between and use cases of the concepts and methods. (Sometimes involving outlining the class on paper), and then using practice tests to highlight gaps.
How do other people study? I’m constantly vacillating between the ideas of taking notes and making flashcards, or just making flashcards. I’d like to study everything the same way, but it seems like for less technical subjects like philosophy making flashcards wouldn’t suffice and I’d need to take notes. For some reason the idea of taking notes for some subjects but not others is uncomfortable to me. And I’m also stuck between taking notes on the literature I read or just keeping a list. It’s getting to the point where I don’t even study or read anymore because I feel like I need to figure out the best way first.
Ideally I want to take no notes whatsoever and just make flashcards in Anki, since it’s quicker and I never look back at notes anyway, but I’m paranoid that I’ll be doing things sub-optimally. Does anyone have any suggestions for what to do? I mostly study math and science.
I believe that both making notes and making flashcards are suboptimal; the best (read: fastest) method I know is to read and understand what you want to learn, then close your eyes and recall everything in full detail (that is hard, and somewhat painful; you should try to remember something for at least few minutes before giving up). Re-read whatever you haven’t remembered. Repeat until convergence.
In math, it helps to solve problems and find counterexamples to theorem conditions, because it leads to deeper understanding, which makes remembering significantly easier. Also try to make as much connections to already known facts and possible applications as possible: our memory is associative.
If possible, I like to allocate full attention to listening to the lecturer instead of dividing it between such and taking notes. However, this isnt always feasible. It helps if there is a slidepack or something similar that will be avaliable afterwards. Most of the time, I’m trying to build a mental construct for how all of the things that I’m learning fit together. Depending on the difficulty of the material, I may need to begin creating this construct pretty soon so I can understand the material, or it may be able to wait until pretty close to the exam. (If I’m not having to take notes, I can start doing it in class, which is more efficient and effective.)
I try to fill in the gaps in my mental model with a list of questions to ask in office hours. In the process, the structure of the material becomes a bit more evident. Is it very interconnected, either in a logical or physical sense? Is it something that seems to be made of arbitrary facts? If the latter, and the material is neither interesting nor useful nor required, I will be tempted to drop the class. If it is interesting or useful, facts stick much better, as I can think about how I can use them, how they help me understand things in such a manner that I can more easily affect them. Not sure that I personally have found many classes interesting but not useful if they lack a structure. If neither, but required, I prefer creating a structure that helps me link things together in a way that will help me remember them. A memorable example was committing a picture of the amino acid table to memory and then stepping through it vertically, horizontally, diagonally to make it stick. A structure that can be useful here is to repeat all past memorized items when memorizing a list. So A, then AB, then ABC, and so on.
I like pictures, lists, and cheat sheets (often worth making for me to help memtal organization even if I can’t take them into a test) for the facts that don’t fit in my mental model, or just as redundancy. Otherwise, I tend to mainly do things by trying to get an understanding of the relationships between and use cases of the concepts and methods. (Sometimes involving outlining the class on paper), and then using practice tests to highlight gaps.
Focus on grokking, on understanding, rather than remembering.