

# Table of Contents

Title Page

GETTING STARTED

#1: STORY IS EVERYTHING

#2: MEMORIZE FACTS BUT UNDERSTAND CONCEPTS

#3: FLASHCARDS ARE THE WAY TO GO

#4: MEMORIZATION + CREATIVITY = RETENTION

#5: BE A MAD SCIENTIST AND EXPERIMENT

#6: TESTS, QUIZZES, AND EXAMS ARE YOUR TIME TO SHINE

#7: BE AN ACTIVE LEARNER, NOT A PASSIVE OBSERVER

#8: YEAH, BUT CAN YOU TEACH IT?

#9: TAKE CARE OF YOUR BODY AND YOUR MIND WILL FOLLOW

#10: NEVER STOP LEARNING, EVEN AFTER THE FINAL EXAM

A PRETTY GOOD SUMMARY OF EVERYTHING SO FAR

84 STUDY TIPS

A FEW MORE EXAMPLES

BONUS: HOW TO QUIT SMOKING BY 'CHANGING THE CHANNEL'

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# GETTING STARTED

Much of what's in this handbook is taken directly from a lecture I made for first year university students when I was in graduate school toiling away teaching undergraduate chemistry labs. Some of the study strategies came about as the result of trial and error; others are based on scientific research, while the rest rely on common sense.  Here, I detail many of the methods I wish I had known about before I entered college.[1] One of the interesting and surprising facts about study methods, and by extension the human mind, is that adopting just a one can make a significant difference in any student's grades.

As strange as it sounds, there exists little formal training on how to earn top grades in high school or college. I don't remember a single lecture by any of my teachers (or even professors in college) devoted to studying more effectively, or about the ways in which the college experience can differ so widely from that of high school.

Our society wouldn't think of sending newly graduated police officers straight out into the community without training on how to use a weapon or read someone their rights, or expect medical students who have never seen the insides of a body to remove a patient's appendix. Looking back on all this now, it's not a bit surprising that I felt as if I was treading water the entire first half of my freshman year in college.

I came equipped with no strategies that could have helped me memorize the names of all the classes of vertebrates in a biology textbook, or which city happens to be the capital of Ghana, only a vague sense that there was more to all of this than simply reading and rereading the notes I took in class over and over again. Like a hamster trapped inside one of those stationary exercise wheels, without a sound study strategy it's no wonder I was having such a hard time keeping up. I know now that it's best to have some sort of a strategy, even if it is an imperfect one because, if it's an evolving strategy, it's possible to find a way to make it work, as long as you keep at it.

In addition to memorization, in this handbook I devote an entire section to test taking because, unfortunately, no one yet has found a better way to gauge the progress of a student other than administering a test, quiz, or examination. While there are certain strategies for taking tests, nothing beats good preparation by studying smart well before the test begins.  Looked at one way, testing is a necessary evil, but in another, it can be seen as a useful tool for enhancing motivation and stimulating learning. And one of the nice things about taking tests is that the more you do it - just like most things in life - the better you will get at it.

To improve my grades after that disastrous freshman semester in college, I first had to undergo a mind shift (also called a "paradigm shift").  I needed to change the way I looked at studying from the point of view of a passive learner to that of an active one. This change in perspective took time to get used to as well as a good deal of trial and error, which is what I hope to save you by writing this book. Good habits can be just as powerful as bad habits, except that to develop good habits one needs to put forth effort to initiate and then nurture these habits into fruition. I was never a standout student in elementary or high school, so if I can turn my grades around 180 degrees, then so can you.

Because I was trained as a scientist and then as a teacher, some of the examples in this handbook are about science, but the concepts apply just as easily to other subjects, from history to art appreciation. Paradigm shifts are crucial to any significant progress, and by the time you finish this handbook, if you've decided to put into practice the methods I describe here, you will have undergone your own paradigm shift as well.

When Copernicus suggested over 400 years ago that the earth was not only capable of moving, but wasn't even at the center of its own solar system, the paradigm shift that resulted brought with it consequences that reached far beyond the field of 16th century astronomy. His (and Galileo's after him) insight not only challenged what the church had been teaching for centuries, that humanity was at the pinnacle of all of God's creation, it also relegated the place we live on to one of the solar system's more desolate outposts.

With the publication of The Starry Messenger by Galileo in 1610, the earth would from then on be thought of as another member of a group of planets revolving in the same direction around the sun.  This one simple mind shift that resulted from Copernicus's moment of insight is why today the educational system throughout the West is influenced not by the church but by reason born of the Enlightenment.

When you change from being a passive learner to an active learner, this too will be a paradigm shift no less important to your education than Copernicus's was for Western civilization. As your mindset changes, you will gradually go from skimming passages in textbooks passively, to reading more deeply and critically. You will begin to listen and take notes during lecture more actively instead of continuing to function as some sort of a stenographer in class. And you will study whenever and wherever you feel it is most effective rather than wasting countless hours dealing with counterproductive distractions. You will, in effect, become more responsible for your own education.

The good news is that there are dozens of changes you can implement to help you out along the way, any one of which is able to make a significant difference in your grades. Many of these techniques are actually "mental tools" and one of the key points this book makes is that you should end up using whatever it is that works best for you.  In addition to picking and choosing your new methods, you also need to experiment continually with them in order to navigate your own unique path through academia.[2]

The first part of this handbook is titled "Story is Everything" because story is probably the single most important word when it comes to learning and memorizing effectively. Once you can understand and use this simple method of memorizing by making up a unique story, you'll never have trouble remembering anything you set your mind to again.  If someone like me - who has only an average memory - can sit down and commit the entire periodic table of the elements to memory, all 118 of them, in only about an hour after learning this simple trick of telling yourself stories, then you have the ability to do it too.[3]

I'll explain how to use this simple method in part 4.  Keep this handbook close, either in your book bag or, better yet, in your mind, and you will always have a toolbox of sorts to rely on wherever you happen to be, whether it's in the classroom or even in the boardroom long after you finish college.

If you believe in and follow this advice, you'll not only have better grades to show for it at the end of the semester, but you'll have several stacks of flashcards to study from for as long as you want to keep them. Homemade flashcards are one of the most basic - and yet underutilized - tools I'll describe in part 3 and there are right ways and wrong ways of putting them into practice.  When I was in college, I saw otherwise bright and motivated students using flashcards the wrong way in just about every class I took. I often wanted to reach out and tell them what I found out from trial and error, but I seldom did. That's one of the reasons I developed the lecture and wrote this handbook based on the lecture: so that my students (and now you) can avoid these pitfalls and won't become one of those frustrated students who never improved their grades no matter how hard they worked at it.

In a nutshell, becoming an active learner is mainly about developing good habits, which is why at the end I included 82 more study tips as well as several examples of how to put into practice these methods for active learning for those who still don't feel completely comfortable with their new paradigm shift yet.

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# #1: STORY IS EVERYTHING

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KEYPOINTS: Our minds prefer vivid 3-dimensional images for recalling concepts and details, not flat lifeless 2-dimensional letters and numbers laid down on paper or on a computer screen.

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We wake up every day to a world our ancestors never could have imagined. It's one of the main reasons we suffer from stresses and diseases they didn't have to deal with, some as mundane as migraine headaches, carpal tunnel syndrome, computer vision syndrome, and falling arches, others more serious like diabetes and certain cancers.

Our bodies were never meant to sit in a chair or lay on a couch eight hours a day. We suffer physical trauma so easily in automobile accidents because we didn't evolve to travel at 70 miles per hour surrounded by a metal cage.

Likewise, our minds didn't evolve to take in and store information using abstract symbols like letters and numbers. Writing - in spite of being so ubiquitous and useful in our everyday world - does not come naturally to our minds. Like automobiles and processed foods, letters and numbers for conveying abstract ideas is a relatively new phenomenon.

In fact, writing is so new- only about 5,200 years old - that humanity hasn't had a chance to adapt to it, biologically.[4] The use of abstract numbers to represent amounts probably began as a means of avoiding starvation. To keep track of how much food was on hand, words and numbers became tools, no less valuable than stone weapons were for hunting down elusive game on the African savannah.

What our ancestors needed most was to know which parts of a plant were useful as food and medicine, and which to avoid because they could make them deathly ill in a surprisingly short time. Long before writing was invented, the first humans conveyed these details verbally as stories. Stories are universal. They are found in every human culture on earth. Telling stories is a defining human trait and they became the glue that held these early societies together.[5] [i] Even in our modern world, no means of communication is more intimate than the bond formed between the storyteller and his or her audience. Stories helped educate while at the same time break down barriers that exist naturally between individuals. As Hollywood has learned to do so effectively, stories can be translated into any language without losing their essential meaning.  And as every parent knows, even small children not only have the ability to understand stories, but actually crave being told them.

Being able to save stories by writing them down was an important advance. The problem is that writing is a two-dimensional way of conveying information, which isn't natural to our minds. Our ancestors wrote on walls, then clay tablets, and finally paper and today we use keyboards to display writing on computer screens. But even with all these advances in technology, writing is still a poor imitation of the three-dimensional world we in fact inhabit and seek to describe. That's why, whatever we read, we change words into three-dimensional pictures in our minds.  Pictures in your mind can be as elaborate as any Hollywood movie, complete with sounds, scents, and textures if you want them (i.e. anything that helps you to remember them). After all, when is the last time you dreamed in words rather than images?

Instead, our minds are built to store and retrieve pictures.  Words and numbers are messengers, tools, and vehicles we use to convey ideas.

The earliest evidence of human story conveyed as images are 30,000-year old cave paintings in Europe and Asia. Not only have cave walls been found decorated with abstract images, but so have rocks, ivory, bone, and shells. The ancient Egyptians believed images held magic, which is why they decorated their tomb walls with so many scenes representing everyday life along the Nile.[6]

Madison Avenue knows well the value of images in storytelling. Think about all those Coca-Cola advertisements around the holidays, or the pink Energizer Bunny.  What do you remember most about them? Their words? Or their images?

When the ancient Roman city of Pompeii was excavated after being covered by lava for almost 2,000 years, pictures on the walls of the houses and public buildings were found nearly everywhere. The walls of houses were lavishly decorated with paintings and frescos. Four distinct styles of art in Pompeii have been identified.[7] One team of artists was even taken by surprise while working right up until the eruption of Mt Vesuvius, as can be seen by their tools still scattered around the floor.[8] It's interesting that no formal school building has ever been found in Pompeii. Children were probably tutored in the public park and leaned only reading, writing, arithmetic, and grammar.[ii]

When we join as few as two images together in our mind, they can become a story. They don't even have to be static, like pictures on paper, but animated if it helps you recall them. Many of the study methods that work best involve turning your lessons into stories so you can experience them more completely. Any word problem in mathematics instantly becomes easier to solve when we translate those words into a picture of the problem simply by sketching it out on a piece of paper.

Modern imaging of the brain has shown that, whenever we try to learn facts and cold hard data, the only part of the brain that lights up (becomes active) has to do with the processing of language. But when we read a story, other parts of our brain become active along with the language center, the same areas that would be active if we were actually experiencing this story in real life.

Our brains being naturally equipped to store pictures rather than numbers helps explain why, when sitting in history class, I had so much difficulty remembering which king was beheaded during the French Revolution. Was it Louis XIV or Louis XVI? It wasn't until my second semester of college that I found a way to create a mental picture (using a simple memorization technique I'll show you in part 4) that I was able to recall from then on without fail that it was Louis XVI - and not the Sun King Louis XIV - who went to his death in the Place de la Revolution of Paris.

These study methods are all about helping you rediscover your evolutionary heritage as a natural-born storyteller. You'll develop the habit of telling stories to your brain so it will remember things better. And the more vivid the stories you create, the more reliably you will remember them, even names and numbers. Perhaps the best proof that our minds have changed very little over so many generations, while society has changed a great deal, is that one of the memorization techniques I'm going to show you in part 4 is so useful, it was practiced by public speakers during the Roman Empire 2,300 years ago.

These days, we live in a world that depends more heavily than ever on numbers and words and have gotten away from creating stories. So how do you go about making them up? Actually, you make up stories all the time without any help. Telling ourselves stories is how we construct our own unique versions of reality. This fact also helps explain why there are so many problems in the world. The human mind is so inventive that it's why we've made up so many different ways to look at the same world we all inhabit.

A good example is the drawing of the two faces - or the vase - depending on how you look at it. If you see the two faces, it's because your brain has decided on seeing them. If you see the vase, then your brain has settled on the vase instead. Neither is right or wrong because in reality it's all just ink on a piece of paper. It's only your brain going about its business of trying to make sense of the world by seeing pictures.[9]

A story can be as simple as a set of images (or even dance moves, as the native Hawaiians told them) linked together, which brings me to the second important trick our brains evolved to do: linking things. Being able to join mental images into a coherent whole is why our ancestors knew how to coordinate a hunt or find the best place to gather fruit and nuts. You do the same thing every time you explain directions to someone.

You may have heard of people on YouTube claiming they can teach someone to memorize π (the number pi) up to 100 digits in only 4 minutes. How they do it is by changing those digits into pictures and then linking those pictures to create a memorable story.

It's easy to make up stories. Here's an example of one I made up in order to memorize the first 5 elements in the periodic table[10] :

A hydrogen-filled balloon lifts off above a family who's having a picnic in a park. Someone standing in the balloon's basket drops some salt into a big pot of soup on the ground. Then, rather than stirring it, someone in the family rubs the outside of the pot instead. / The first element in Group I of the periodic table is hydrogen (the balloon is filled with hydrogen gas, which is why it can fly), the next element in Group I is lithium (the balloon "Lifts off". Get it?). The element below lithium in the periodic table is sodium (table salt is sodium chloride), and potassium is just below sodium in the periodic table (the "Pot" of soup). The 5th element in Group I is rubidium (a cousin at this particular family picnic "rubs" the pot instead of stirring it). Easy, and you can always modify your stories as needed, the sillier you make your images, the better too. For example, the color of the pot I made up was black, but if I had needed to recall that the element sodium is silver in color, I would have made the color of the pot change to silver after the salt was dropped into it.

You can make up anything you want to in your mind. This gives you the ability to link absolutely anything with anything else you ever need to within your stories. It is going to be YOUR story, after all. All it takes is some imagination. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus claimed that to instruct, you must first entertain. So make your stories as entertaining as possible and you'll remember them.

History has its share of examples where images inspired great ideas. Newton seeing an apple fall and realizing the moon is "falling" around the earth for the same reason...a force he called "gravity". In physics, students learn that Newton transcribed his ideas into simple, yet very useful formulas, like F = ma. But all these equations began as images in Newton's mind that eventually took humans to the moon.

Ohm's Law is a simple equation that tells us the amount of electrical current flowing through a wire depends on the amount of force (voltage) pushing it, but the whole idea of electricity being a "flow" began with Benjamin Franklin picturing electricity like water (this is why we have many of the same terms to describe both electricity and water, such as current, flow, circuit, capacity, resistance, and pressure).

Quite some time ago, I had a job selling popcorn and ice cream at a theme park in Orlando, Florida. A lot of tourists who visit don't realize it, but underneath their feet is a veritable beehive of activity, almost like a small city. In fact, I used to get into costume (people who work in the parks at Disneyworld are all known as "cast members") underneath Dumbo's Ride. On break, I sometimes used the computers down in the tunnels to check my e-mail. There's also a library with just about every book that's ever been published about the park's creator, Walt Disney. So I read about him, and the more I assimilated, the more I realized that if there is one word to describe his philosophy about entertainment, it is "story". Even his rides, which have enchanted people of all ages and cultures, are built around stories. Space Mountain...Pirates of the Caribbean...the Haunted Mansion. I'm an admirer of Walt Disney, or anyone who doesn't give up on their dreams. In order to save his first company from going bankrupt, the man slept in his office and ate cold beans out of a can.[11]

In #4 I'll show you how to use mental pictures to memorize almost anything by incorporating a simple process called "linking".

I've found that all good speakers - from professors and ministers to politicians and salespeople - know that what they are really doing is relating a series of stories. They know that their audience wants to understand things by forming a series of pictures in their mind. And the more vivid the stories a speaker tells, the more impact it has on his or her audience.

If you're studying correctly, as you go along you'll be creating a series of images in your mind, images that you can link together into a coherent story, and that's what makes your lessons more memorable. Letters, numbers, and words will all fade with time, but a mental picture, if it's vivid enough, is yours to keep forever.

Our need to hear and construct stories in order to make sense out of the world around is as real and tangible as the nose on your face and the heartbeat in your chest. It's part of being human and it's okay to embrace it.

It's possible to put these study methods into practice today, because another human trait is adaptability. We're omnivores, which helps explain why we've been so successful. Evolutionary biologists claim that a species with the ability to adapt to changing conditions is most likely to survive changing times, and survive we certainly have.[12]

We also have a natural tendency to make connections, and connecting images is a simple kind of a "story". So don't be afraid to make up stories. The sillier they are, the more likely you'll be to remember them. It's a strange fact about our minds, but nonetheless quite true.

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# #2: MEMORIZE FACTS BUT UNDERSTAND CONCEPTS

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KEYPOINTS: Being able to do each may require different strategies.  Each subject tends to have "core knowledge" around which all the details revolve. Joining facts together to create the big picture can be made easier with use of the analogy.

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Two thousand years ago, students in ancient Rome learned all their lessons by heart after listening and then repeating them back to their teacher (who was usually more like what we would call a tutor these days). It's how they learned and memorized the great works of antiquity including those by Homer and Cicero. Students in classical antiquity weren't expected to ask, let alone know, the reason for learning things. If they had asked, there's a good chance their answer would have come in the form of a stinging sensation on their backsides by way of a leather whip or a bamboo cane.

If you're having trouble answering essay questions, then it's likely you haven't familiarized yourself enough with "the big picture" in your studies. The traditional "bottom up" approach teaches us that we should first understand the details of a topic before we understand its concept, but sometimes it's easier to take a mental "step back" and concentrate more on the core concept first and then all its minute details.  In practice, you can start with either, depending on which gets you motivated the most.

A useful analogy is with the skeleton of an animal and its flesh. None can exist without both. Even jellyfish and sea anemones have a hydrostatic skeleton (strengthened with water).  You can think of the skeleton as representing the basic concepts of a topic and its details are the analogous to the flesh. Some animal's skeletons, such as ours, are inside the body (endoskeletons) while others are on the outside (exoskeletons, like insects, oysters, and crabs), but most skeletons have one purpose in common: to provide a scaffolding upon which everything else is built.

You should be looking at the details, but always only to get at the basic concept that the details describe, because it is the core concepts that will stay in your mind longer (by providing the "scaffolding"). Eventually, when you understand the concept, the details will become easier to recall.  In fact, they almost seem to fall into place.  For example, hot air balloons rise in the atmosphere for the same reason boats float on the surface of water, even though these two methods of transport are very different things. One takes place in water, the other in air. It wasn't until I understood the concept of "density" in physics that it began to make more sense and the details became easier to remember. Hot air balloons rise up into the atmosphere because the air inside the balloon is less dense than the colder air surrounding it and so hot air balloons are really floating on the atmosphere, for the same reason boats float on water (boats and the air inside them are less dense than the water they displace).[13]

You can make your own analogies by first looking for patterns, and some analogies will always be better than others.  In fact, even wrong analogies can still be useful for understanding new concepts. Before William Harvey discovered in 1628 that blood in the human body continually recycles, or circulates, people assumed that blood was always being made in the liver to nourish the body and then it ebbed and flowed around the body, kind of like the way the ocean's tides rise and fall along the seashore. Comparing the flow of blood with the earth's tides turned out to be a misleading analogy. But understanding the basic concept that blood is continuously recycles allows a student to remember details, like the difference between arteries and veins of the body, that much easier. Blood always flows away from the heart in arteries and then flows back towards the heart in veins. It's the capillaries (which Harvey never got to see since he didn't have a microscope) that join the arteries and veins in the tissues, thereby completing the circuit.[14]

Plants, on the other hand, are not analogous to animals because water in plants generally flows in one direction: from the roots up the stem and out of tiny holes in their leaves. It's a one-way flow when it comes to water inside plants. There is no circulation. But drawing this false analogy with animals fooled scientists for much of the 19th century.  Still, remembering this false analogy can help you remember water flow in both animals and plants by recalling that they are opposites.

I'll honest with you. I'm not a big fan of speed-reading. Being able to do it can help you get through a lot more reading than you might otherwise accomplish. But one of the things I've noticed is that students who rely on doing a lot of speed-reading often don't retain as much information as someone who takes their time and thinks about what they're reading while they're reading it.  Speed-reading can be like eating without chewing sometimes. I'm sure there are speed-readers who can do both; it's just that it hasn't been my experience.

The way I see it is that, as long as you give yourself enough time to study, then you shouldn't need to skim anything in your book (including the diagrams, images, and their captions). It's like when I leave for work in the morning. If I leave early enough, I can rest assured that I usually won't have to be in a hurry and can therefore enjoy the drive more.  In fact, writers and inventors often say that some of their best ideas come when they're walking or driving at a more leisurely pace.

It's when you slow down and think about what you are reading that you can put into perspective what it is you're taking in, to see how it fits into a much "bigger picture". For example, skimming quickly a chapter in an introductory course on world religions might cause you to miss the fact that, around the same time that people began living closer together in large cities, several important sages were walking the earth: the founder of Buddhism in India, Confucianism in China, and Platonism in ancient Greece. Coming up with an explanation for why these schools of thought all came about around the same time - while beliefs in ritual, magic, and animal sacrifice was decreasing in importance in the civilized world - could make for an interesting topic in a book report or a thesis paper. Hint: all these new philosophies advocated having a conscience and acting accordingly.

If you don't slow down, you could miss interesting connections like this. Taking time to reflect is one of the things that makes learning enjoyable and sets highly creative people apart from the rest of us. You may have noticed that artists often set their own hours, even if it means being up at weird times of the night (it can be really quiet at 4 in the morning!).

I'm not completely against speed-reading, as it's probably best to be able to do it when the situation calls for it. It's just that I've found over the years that when I read slower it's easier to understand and put into perspective the bigger picture.

Keep searching for, and understanding, the basic underlying concepts to whatever it is you're studying, and you will be rewarded when the details eventually fall into place, kind of like flesh does upon the bones.[15]

One of the things that becomes obvious after you take a few courses is that every subject has its main material - or core body of knowledge - that is most important to know, and everything else falls into the realm of details. The difference between details and core concepts is analogous to how certain organs of the body we can live without, like our eyes and appendix, while others are vital to life, like our heart and brain.

History can look like one giant mess of dates, events, and people, until you realize there are certain periods that everything fits into, and when you find these key points, you can use them like sign posts or mileage markers to put everything else into perspective. For example, in human history, some significant chunks of time can be divided into: before agriculture began, after agriculture began, the invention of writing, the classical period, the dark ages, the invention of the printing press which brought on the Renaissance, the industrial revolution when more people began living in cities, and finally the information revolution that we're currently in now.

Start by picking a period of time you're most interested in. For me it was 1620 when the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock. Galileo at that time was trying to figure out what comets were made of. Or, in 1492, Columbus was sailing west from Spain, eventually running into North America, while Copernicus was busy studying mathematics in Krakow at a university. While as far as I know Columbus and Copernicus never actually met, if I had to make up a story in my mind, I'm sure I could find a way to have them engage in some kind of conversation that could help me remember that they were indeed contemporaries.

Even the field of mathematics can be divided into its concepts and its details. In algebra, there are only a few simple "rules" to memorize, and with these important guidelines, you can solve even the most difficult equations. These few basic rules are actually valuable mental tools. I sometimes pointed out to my students that they had to learn more rules just to come to school than they did to learn algebra. They had to know how to dress appropriately, to be on time, not to chew gum, not to talk while the teacher is talking, not to swear, not to run in the hallway, on and on... With algebra, it's just a core handful of rules such as: 2 + 3 = 3 + 2 , which is called the "commutative rule". ("to commute" means to move around).[16] As long as you follow these few simple rules, or core concepts, you can solve ANY algebra problem no matter how complicated its details first look on paper.

Core areas in a subject are things that often affect us on a more personal level. Do you recall wondering as a child why the earth keeps going around the sun without stopping? If you look at things here on earth, they stop after a while unless you do something to keep them going, like giving them an additional push.  The pencil comes to a stop on the desk or on the floor after it falls off, the rock you kick eventually stops in the road no matter how hard you kick it, etc.  That's because we live in a world here on the surface of the earth dominated by friction. But in outer space, there is no friction because there is no matter. (no atmosphere to slow anything down) It's a vacuum that surrounds our solar system.

One of the core areas of physics is motion. In fact, physics is usually about motion in one form or another. Everything in the universe is moving, even the tiny carbon atoms making up a diamond ring. This helps me to remember Newton's first law, the law of inertia. Objects that are at rest want to remain at rest unless you force them to move, while things already in motion want to remain in motion unless there's a force (like friction) that will make them stop. And that is why the earth keeps on traveling through space at 18.5 miles every second even though there's nothing out there pushing it along anymore. Thanks for elucidating that simple, yet universal concept about motion, Isaac.  The man really was a genius.

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# #3: FLASHCARDS ARE THE WAY TO GO

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KEYPOINTS: Homemade flashcards are not only effective study aids for committing almost any lesson to memory, but they're portable, cheap, and offer you the opportunity to rewrite your notes from lecture while encouraging creativity.

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There's a good reason paper is still around after all these centuries.[17] Paper is a durable, dependable technology. Imagine a power outage that lasts several days, so long that you can't recharge the batteries on any of your devices, but you do have some candles and a book. You have two versions of the novel War and Peace in your room.  One is in electronic form on your laptop while the other is made of paper in book form. Which do you think you'll be using by the time you get to the part of the novel where the Russians are abandoning a burning Moscow to Napoleon?

It's true that your friends may make fun of you for carrying around note cards, even though they carry around strips of paper a lot thinner than your cards inside their wallets. The Chinese invented paper money and it's still around after 27 centuries, since the Tang Dynasty (740 BC). It's because paper is so versatile and durable that it's still so ubiquitous, even in the 21st century.[18]

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FEELING OVERWHELMED?

There comes a time in almost every class - often somewhere around the midway point of the semester - where you will feel completely bombarded with too many facts, equations, dates, strings of numbers, etc, etc. The first and only time I was seriously tempted to cheat on a test was my 2nd semester of basic chemistry.  I had it all arranged in my mind. I would put my notes with equations for determining pH and molar concentration sticking part way out of my textbook below my desk. My eyes were still good enough in those days to see distance and all I had to do was drop my pencil...well you know the rest.  Then, a fortuitous thing happened. The test got cancelled; I don't' recall the reason.  Just like that, I had an extra week to study.

No one ever told me to transfer my chemistry word problems onto the front of a flashcard, but then again no one ever told me I couldn't, so I just went ahead and did it. On the front I put the word problem and on the back I put the answer along with all the equations needed to get the answer.  It's a strange thing, but even though I couldn't remember the actual answer (which is why I could use the same flashcards over and over again), I could eventually, with practice, remember how to memorize and use the equations to arrive at the answer. I aced the test without cheating. No one was more surprised that it's possible to use flashcards for word problems in chemistry than I was. I became a believer and from then on used them for just about every class.

There are modifications to every method and you should always be experimenting with whatever works best for you. For example, with algebra it might be more useful to use a worksheet or old exam to practice with. Write the correct answers on the back of the sheet and you won't be tempted to look at them. For either method, you can carry around a notebook (one of those dirt cheap ones you don't care about even if you happen to leave it behind somewhere) to do your practicing in. Nobody says you can't carry around your own scrap paper in the form of a cheap notebook.

Your ability to use flashcards for math (or any subject) is limited only by your imagination. Can't remember the difference between sine and cosine in trigonometry class? Think of a stop sign. It's out in front of you. The opposite leg on a right triangle is out in front of the origin of the graph, too. So sine is defined simply as the opposite leg of the triangle divided by its hypotenuse. Cosine is the other leg (the adjacent one) divided by that same hypotenuse. Easy.

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7 GOOD REASONS FOR HOMEMADE FLASHCARDS

(1) Having plenty of nice, clean, blank index cards in your backpack gives you opportunity and incentive to copy those messy notes from class over again at home (or wherever you study best), this time more neatly and succinctly so you can read them easier and faster. Research shows that when you write something down using your hands, it piques your brain's curiosity, which makes your brain take an added interest in whatever it is you are writing.  A good rule of thumb is: repetition never hurts. Index cards are cheap, too. If you were a student in ancient Rome, unless you had excellent penmanship, you wouldn't have even been allowed to write on paper because it was just too expensive to throw away. You'd have had to use a stylus to etch your lessons onto a wax tablet instead.[19]

(2) Flashcards are portable and can be bound with a rubber band. Heck, they can even fit right inside your pocket. These are just some of the good reasons flashcards have been around since at least the early 19th century.[20] Walking or sitting in a fresh new environment can make your brain more willing to take in and assimilate new information.  Students for about 400 years (from about the mid-1400's all the way until the mid-1800's) had to carry around bulky hornbooks to memorize lessons. You can picture a hornbook as a wide paddle, perhaps made of bone, leather, wood, or even stone sometimes! Hornbooks were heavy and every morning, students were required to tack their current lesson (written on paper) onto the board and then they secured their hornbooks around their neck or waist. If they were fortunate enough to go to school, this is how children in Abraham Lincoln's time would have learned their ABC's.[21]

(3) They're cumulative, meaning you can keep adding more and more cards to your stack as the semester goes forward (and even take some cards out that you don't need anymore). You can also keep your homemade flashcards to study for a final exam (or any other exam like the SAT's, or MCAT for medical school, etc). I still have mine from organic chemistry over two decades ago and I test myself whenever I run across them in my dresser drawer, just to reassure myself I haven't forgotten everything.

(4) Making flashcards provides yet another opportunity to practice your creativity, and if you ask any writer or artist, they'll probably tell you that creativity is similar to a muscle. You have to exercise it in order to depend on it. I usually copied my notes from class (or the textbook) over onto flashcards as soon as I got home, but I changed the sentences from my notes and put them in the form of a quiz or test. I made up questions for one side of the card and put the answers on the back. It can be fun sometimes, almost like having your own game show.

(5) You can shuffle your flashcards to introduce randomness or even join them with other cards from other subjects to add variety to a study routine that isn't very exciting (it helps to be somewhat excited if you want to learn efficiently).  Research shows that adding variety to your environment can be helpful in learning any new material, whether it's written or verbal. Variety, variety, variety!

(6) Flashcards are like an old friend and study mate who is able to tell you when you're ready to take the test. This will be when you don't have to turn the cards over anymore to look at the answers on the back. BTW, nothing says you can't put several questions onto a single card. Just be sure to line the answers on the back up with the questions on the front. Use the rest of the cards in the stack to cover up the lower answers so you don't accidentally see them on the back before you're ready for that question.

(7) With some imagination, almost any subject can be transcribed onto flashcards.  For math problems, I carried around two additional things: a blank notebook that I used as scratch paper and a pencil or pen. When I filled the scrap notebook up, I simply threw it away. When I used a pencil, I made sure it had a good eraser, too. Making mistakes is a vital part of learning. NEVER beat yourself up for making mistakes. Making mistakes simply means you're trying.[22]

Okay, so lots of people will still snicker at someone using flashcards to learn their lessons while standing in line at the bank or supermarket, but don't let it bother you. Vladimir Nabokov wrote most of his novels on index cards before typing them up as a book.  And at least you're not a student in ancient Rome, having to use broken pieces of pottery to etch lessons into using a metal stylus.  Just remember that if paper was a good enough technology for Johannes Guttenberg, the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, and Thomas Jefferson, then it's still going to be useful enough for you.

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# #4: MEMORIZATION + CREATIVITY = RETENTION

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KEYPOINTS: Even though it might seem paradoxical, the further you let your imagination roam, the more successful your ability to hold onto facts and concepts will become.

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As already mentioned, our brains evolved over millions of years within a 3-dimensional world, one made up of rocks and water and trees and animals, etc. Words and numbers when written down are 2-dimensional representations of reality on a flat surface (even a computer screen is 2-dimensional). This is unnatural.  To get things into your brain and remain there, you need to turn them into 3-dimensional representations of what you want to retain. The good news is that you've been telling yourself stories since before you learned to read. It's just that now you'll be doing it consciously, and there are a couple simple tricks that will give you the confidence to accomplish this more easily.

The most valuable book I found to help with my grades in college was a thin paperback I came across in the school's library. One of the ways I found to relax during a brief study break was to walk up and down the aisles of the library totally at random, while gazing at all the various titles in no particular order. It was also a good way to relieve eyestrain and keep my legs from falling asleep.  On this particular afternoon and purely by chance, I came across a book about memorization. It was so thin that I almost walked right by, and yet it turned out to be the most valuable study aid I found my entire time in school. I credit that little book with helping me make all A's, even in subjects I had little interest in, like Art Appreciation and Social Studies.

Even though I'm someone who has always considered his memory lacking when compared to other people's memories, I astounded myself by sitting down and memorizing the entire periodic table of elements, in the right order even, after reading just the two introductory chapters of that book, and I even remembered the elements in their exact order when I woke up the next morning. How did I do it? Simply by making up a story. Needless to say, I became a believer right then and there. In fact, that book, more than any other single influence, I still credit with getting me into graduate school.

The two most valuable memorization strategies I came across that day are explained below and if you have any creative ability at all (of course you do) you'll soon be putting them to good use as part of your new routine. These simple memorization techniques are, like your homemade flashcards, more methods to add to your toolbox. The only difference is that no one will ever see them but you because they're your mental tools.[23]

By doing an Internet search, you'll come across dozens of methods that claim to make memorization more effective, but the two I know for sure work are (1) the Major System for memorizing numbers, and (2) the Mind Palace, which provides a scaffolding for linking various things you want to remember in a story. And so, without further ado, here they are...

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THE MAJOR SYSTEM

For remembering numbers by forming pictures

This simple device is the most effective method for memorizing numbers, including dates, constants in science, or any other numerical fact. It's based on the idea that your mind is able to associate (link) the sounds of consonants (i.e. non-vowels) directly to specific numbers. And once you've memorized the consonant sound to the number it is linked to, you can create vivid images (and even stories).

For example, with this system the "d" or  "t" and "th" sounds are always linked to the number 1, while the "j" or "soft-g" sounds are linked to the number 6. This is how I was finally able to remember that Louis XVI and not Louis XIV was the king who had his head chopped off during the French Revolution. I pictured (in my mind) Louis XVI's head sliding off the guillotine and onto a dish (16 = d + sh sounds). You can put whatever vowels in between the consonants you want depending on which word or words you want to use. I suppose I could have come up with several words other than "dish" that had those two consonant sounds and in that order, but dish seemed the easiest at the time. It took all of about one minute to finally commit a fact to memory that, before then, never quite stuck in my mind over a whole year. That's how valuable simple memory tricks like the Major System can be.

Here is the full list of the consonant sounds and the numbers they are linked to, from 0 to 9. It is important (right now) to memorize these sounds and link them to their numbers. Put them on your flashcards if you feel it will help.

0 = Z sound, S sound, or soft-C sound

1 = D sound, or Th sound, or hard-T sound

2 = N sound

3 = M sound

4 = R sound

5 = L sound

6 = Sh sound, or soft-Ch sound, or soft-G sound, or the J sound

7 = hard-G sound, or K sound, or hard-C sound

8 = F sound, or V sound

9 = B sound, or P sound

You only need to burn these 10 numbers and their sounds into your memory. If you do this, you'll be able to use them to form pictures for any numbers you want to recall from this day forward.

Here are some hints that can help you remember them: the 0 is linked to "z" or "s" sound and the word is spelled "zero" (which begins with a "z"). 1 is linked to the easiest consonant sounds there are to make, the "d" or "t" sound.  In fact, d and t sound like they should represent a single down-stroke.  2 is linked to the "n" sound, and the letter "n" has two vertical lines in it.  3 is linked to the "m" sound, which has 3 vertical lines making up the letter "m". 4 is linked to the "r" sound and the capital "R" looks like a backwards 4.  5 is linked to the "L" sound and the number 5 looks like it wants to fall over, so it needs a bookend to hold it up. The letter "L" looks like it would make a good bookend.  6 is linked to the sh and j sounds and "six" starts with an "s" (but don't confuse it with zero).  You could also picture the letter j growing a longer tail until it curls up at the bottom to look like a backwards 6.  7 is linked to "k" sound and two 7's, linked back-to-back, looks somewhat like a K. 8 is linked to "f" and "v" sounds and this is more difficult to find a connection. I ended up rhyming "eight" with "fate" and remembered it that way (since fate begins with the letter f). You can use "fate" too if it helps, or come up with a way that works for you. 9 is linked to the "b" and "p" sounds, and the letter b looks like an upside down 9.

Now try testing yourself. How would you link 1776 with Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence? Try it. Be sure to make the words you decide to use as vivid as possible in your mind.  The consonant sounds you'll need are: d (or t) for the number 1, k (or hard-c or hard-g) for the number 7, and sh (or j or soft-ch) for the number 6.

Answer: One possible way you could do it is to picture Jefferson "tuck cash" into his pocket as a reward for authoring the document. T = 1  K = 7 hard-C = 7  sh = 6. Tuck cash is 1776.

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THE MIND PALACE

For memorizing objects, concepts, actions, or anything else you can imagine, by creating a story.

This method (which is also called the "Method of Loci") works so well, it has been around for over 2,000 years! The ancient Romans and Greeks used it to recall each of the topics they wanted to cover in their speeches. It's why you might also hear this method referred to as the "Roman Room System". It's kind of fun to consider that, when you use the Mind Palace, you are in a way linking yourself to Mark Anthony. "Friends, Romans, Countrymen..."

The key here is to be able to close your eyes and picture a room (or an entire house if you need it) in enough detail that you can remember every important object within that room or house in an exact order as you walk through it (in your mind, of course). It could be a place you grew up in or you know very well, or you could create this place out of whole cloth. Once you have this special place securely in your mind, you can link anything you want to the objects in this room.

For example, as I walked into my grandmother's house, I first came upon a welcome mat, then the front door, an easy chair (try picturing these permanent objects in as much detail as possible), then I came across her fireplace, her bookcase, a corner where a table with a vase was, etc. Vases are good for holding a lot of different objects in besides flowers!

Now, suppose you needed to memorize the first three presidents after Abraham Lincoln using my grandmother's house. One way to do it would be to picture someone you know named John, along with his son standing on the welcome mat, then they knock on the door (which John and his son are surprised to see is made of granite), and laying on the chair is a bail of hay for some strange reason (the more outrageous you make your images, the more likely you will be to recall them later on). That makes it easy to remember that Johnson (John & his son), Grant (the door was made of granite), and Hayes (a bail of hay sitting in the chair) were names of the first three presidents who served after Lincoln.[24]

If you don't want to use a room, you can use a particular walk or maybe even a hike you've taken many times. For example, if I walked south in my grandmother's small town, I'd pass a school, then a large walnut tree, then the city band shell, and eventually a fire hydrant. It's possible to picture almost anything inside a school, or hanging from a walnut tree, or being sprayed by a fire hydrant, etc. The key thing here is that you always remember the permanent things along your path or in your house so they never change. Then, with some imagination, you can link anything you want directly to them.

If I were to make an analogy, I'd say that the Mind Palace is like a skeleton, and the transient details that you link to the skeleton are the flesh you need to remember.

Don't underestimate the power of you memory. Most of the times you've ever had trouble remembering something, it's probably because you never put out the effort to notice it in the first place. Below is a word problem that helps shed light on this everyday situation we often find ourselves in:

Suppose a farmer has an orchard and on this day he will pick a certain number of apples from his trees. At the first tree, he picks a dozen apples. Then he walks to the next tree and picks 4 apples. At the next tree he picks only 3 apples. Then he loses 1 apple when a bird swoops down and carries away an apple. Then he goes to the last tree and picks 5 apples. Here's the question: how many trees did the farmer stop at? I'll bet you thought I was going to ask how many apples he had left in his basket. The point is that, if you had known ahead of time what it was you needed to know, you would have taken note of how many trees the farmer stopped at instead of the number of apples he picked. What this means is that you can't remember something until you first stop and take notice of it. Only then can you make an effort to commit it to memory.

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# #5: BE A MAD SCIENTIST AND EXPERIMENT

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KEYPOINTS:  Whatever works for you is the best strategy. No two people are exactly the same.

When studying world religions, one of the reasons I found Buddhism interesting is that its founder told his followers never to take his word for anything, but to go out and find out for themselves what the truth is. So don't take my word for anything, either. Do whatever works best for you, even if it means cherry-picking ideas here and there and leaving out the rest. The Internet has study tips too, including YouTube (search "mind palace" for some creative videos if you're still having trouble understanding that method). Explore.

No two people are exactly alike either physically or mentally. Even identical twins don't think or act alike, which is why the goal in medical research these days is to have what they're calling "personalized medicine". We're all different.[25]

When I was taking general chemistry in college, things were going along fine for a while, then for some reason one of the concepts we came to and I couldn't quite grasp was "moles". A small word, but it caused a lot of problems for me and this particular mole is not the animal that lives underground, but it's actually a number, sort of like the way a "dozen" will always represent the number 12, except that this number in chemistry is really, really huge. In college there will be professors who will teach straight out of the book. The explanation my textbook gave for moles had very few illustrations and no matter how many times I read and reread the book or my notes from class, I just couldn't get what a "mole" was.

The most valuable thing I eventually did was to go over to the library and look for other chemistry textbooks. College libraries will often have on their shelves many old textbooks from previous years. Usually, a professor can choose which textbook he or she wants to use in their class, so over the years university libraries have accumulated a multitude of old textbooks. An interesting thing about most basic concepts is that they don't change.  Their core ideas always remain the same, which is probably why I like learning concepts more than details.

Newton's laws of motion that he came up with and published in a book in 1687 had concepts that got Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin onto the surface of the moon...Einstein's General Relativity wasn't required at all in Apollo since the astronauts never traveled anywhere close to the speed of light. I'll explain more about "core knowledge" in # 6. Eventually, I found an old, beat up textbook with the binding coming off but it explained moles in a way I needed to understand it, complete with a wider variety of illustrations.  The core concept of moles hadn't changed in over 100 years and finding the right book to explain it made all the difference.

Here's another common trap that students sometimes fall into. When you see another student who seems to understand everything quickly, it can make one feel inferior. What you have to remind yourself is that not everyone travels at the same speed or has the same background.  I've found, for example, that Europeans such as Swedes often do better in science. It's not natural ability. It's because their curriculum in lower grades puts less emphasis on humanities and more on science.

Chances are that the student who's making all A's in your college class is doing his or her homework every evening, even if they don't admit it. When I was in high school, calculators were not yet small enough to carry around in your pocket, so as a result students taking advanced classes in calculus or trigonometry carried around these long slide rulers. Slide rulers eventually became status symbols, very high profile ways of rubbing it into the ones who were still struggling with algebra. Most kids want to impress other kids. It's natural, so don't be intimidated. They're probably not really smarter than you are. It's more likely they're doing their homework regularly and want you to think they're smarter.

Some famous writers (like Hemingway) wrote better in the morning, while others (like Faulkner) did their best writing in the evening. The only right time to study is when it's right for you. Research has shown that changing your location engages parts of the brain that involve retention. No one knows why this is, but it probably has to do with the brain being better at taking information in as "chunks"...and you're engaging several parts of the brain at once when you move around, or are touching something (called tactile learning). When you move around, you're telling your brain to "pay attention" more, which makes for a good chance to sneak some additional information into your brain as well, like the kind of stuff you need to know for a test.

Sometimes you may have to invent your own way to study. In fact, invention is just another way creativity is made tangible. Picture characters you invent in your mind, imagine a conversation between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton about not only their views on the role of the Federal government in everyday life, but what kind of clothes they preferred or who was taller than whom, whatever, and it will make it easier to use the memorization techniques I explained in # 4.

It's also about finding a way to motivate yourself.  When someone in ancient Rome wanted to further their education in philosophy, they traveled to Greece if their family could afford to send them.[26] These days the main desire seems to be getting a good job. In ancient times, education was mostly a status symbol, not really a way to get a good job.  What job someone was going to do the rest of their life was decided before they were even born by what their parents did. See how fortunate you are?

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# #6: TESTS, QUIZZES, AND EXAMS ARE YOUR TIME TO SHINE

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KEYPOINTS: Tests are an opportunity to self-motivate and review what you've learned. Different kinds of test questions may require different strategies.

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If you could travel back in time to ancient Greece or Rome, there would be no tests to prepare for. The bad news is that you would have gotten hit with a cane on your backside if you made a mistake reciting back from memory what you'd just heard from your teacher. Students in classical antiquity (and all the way up through the Middle Ages) had their progress measured by repeating back verbal exercises, and it was all based on memorization.[27]

Test taking these days can be narrowed down to two important things: preparation and confidence. Without practice, you won't develop confidence, and without confidence, you'll psych yourself out before you even write your name on the test. But if you're prepared (or better yet, somewhat over-prepared!), you'll be much more confident. And the more confident you are, the more likely you'll be to show your best work.

It's pretty unthinkable that a college quarterback would take the field on game day without first practicing handling the ball, or a member of an orchestra playing in a concert without knowing their instrument or the music that's about to be played.  In fact, professional musicians spend time practicing a lot more than most people think. So why do so many students believe that learning a new subject in school and demonstrating what you've learned by taking a test, a quiz, or an examination should be any different?

If you've been following this advice and studying with your flashcards, then you'll have the confidence to do better and I'm betting you will.  Tip: it's normal for your body to release adrenaline, the fight-or-flight hormone. It makes your heart speed up and your palms sweat, among other things. Just tell yourself it's happening because your desire to do your best on the test and you'll be all right.  To change your thinking at any point during the test, put your hand on your chest and concentrate only on your breathing. This will help relax you.

Some of the preparation you'll do comes with time, such as getting to know your strengths and weaknesses, what kinds of tests your instructor tends to give, or how much time you should spend on any given type of problem on a test.

The suggestions below are actually tools to add to your toolbox to help build up your confidence for taking tests and exams. Trust me. Taking an exam is no different from a lot of things in life, because the more you do it, the better you will get at it. Our minds have an innate ability to improve upon whatever has gone before. After all, it's the main reason we don't live in caves anymore.[28]

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DIFFERENT TYPES OF QUESTIONS REQUIRE DIFFERENT STRATEGIES

HERE'S A TIP: Answer the questions you know first on a test and skip any whose answers don't immediately come to mind. This not only gets the easier ones out of the way, but it helps build up your confidence. For example, beginning with the section on matching is a good way to remind yourself of the key vocabulary words that are important and may show up on other parts of the test.

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MATCHING QUESTIONS

Matching questions are usually considered some of the easiest, but those long lists of vocabulary words can make you feel like you're looking down the Grand Canyon at first. Long lists of new words can get pretty intimidating (if you let them).

(1) Before you begin answering, take some time and think about each word and see what comes back to you without trying too hard. The idea here is to relax and jog your memory a little and see what comes up. Chances are, you can remember a lot more of the material than you think. You're probing your mind here, kind of like poking a beehive with a long stick, just to see what comes flying out.

(2) Some of the words in the matching section of the test might be useful for answering other questions on other parts of the same test. You can always be looking for clues from one question on a test to help answer a different question on the test like this.  Teachers actually don't want their students to fail, so they will often give little hints on the test.

(3) When you're ready to start matching, begin by hunting for relationships between one word on one side and all the other words on the other side. Remember, you're still just trying to jog your memory here. Relax.

(4) Match the obvious ones you know first with their meanings. Save the more difficult words for later.

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TRUE OR FALSE QUESTIONS

Most students consider true or false questions easy, maybe because they believe that even if they guess on each one, on average they'll still get at least a 50%. But if you have to guess, there are some good rules to follow that can give you an edge.

(1) The true answer will often contain more words in its sentence than the false answer will.

(2) Often, the part of the sentence that makes the question false is added on at the end of the sentence.

(3) False questions tend to contain more extreme modifiers such as: always, never, only, and all. True questions tend to use less decisive words such as: usually, tends to have, seldom, often, likely, and might. You get the idea. It takes more work for a teacher to create a true answer than a false one.

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FILL IN THE BLANK QUESTIONS

Believe it or not, most teachers want their students to do well on their tests. It's validation that we did a good job teaching you. Sometimes we'll give little hints on the test to guide you in the right direction.

(1) The length of the blank can sometimes be a clue as to which word to use. Longer blanks can mean that your teacher wants a longer word, and vice versa.

(2) It might be better to save these kinds of questions for after you've looked over the entire test and given your mind a chance to remember what all the vocabulary words mean.

(3) If you save these more difficult questions for the end, you'll probably be more relaxed and confident in your memory when you get to them.

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MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS

(1) My first year at a university, I had two classes with over 300 students in it, so many that they had to hold these classes in the local multiplex cinema across the street. So naturally most of the exams consisted of multiple-choice questions. Since I was used to doing essay questions at my old school, I had some trouble adjusting at first and my grades dropped. Then I found that if I simply covered up all the answers with my hand and tried to come up with the correct answer myself, it often appeared as one of the selections. This not only boosted my confidence (always a good thing when taking a test), but it helped jog my memory about other things in the lesson I didn't even know I had remembered. You probably can remember a lot more than you think.

(2) If the choices are amounts (quantities of things), more often the correct answer will be one of the in between answers and not the extremely high or low answer.

(3) Cross out the incorrect answers so they don't distract you. The correct answer is often the first one you noticed.

(4) If two answers seem very similar, the correct answer is probably going to be one of them.  Likewise, if two answers are the opposites of each other, it's probably one of those answers.

(5) The correct answer is often longer and more grammatically correct.

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ESSAY QUESTIONS

Essay questions can be the most dangerous critters in the sea, but if you've prepared well enough for the test (or even hopefully somewhat over-prepared), unlike many of your fellow students, you won't be intimidated by essay questions. In fact, you'll eagerly anticipate this section of the test because open-ended questions like these give you the opportunity to show what you know. Just be careful you don't get too enthusiastic and add incorrect information you're not sure about.

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(1) Take a minute or so before writing anything to organize your thoughts, first. Teachers are like anyone else and would rather read a good story - you know, the kind with a beginning, middle, and an end - as opposed to a hodgepodge, mishmash of details resembling some kind of an info dump.

(2) BE CAREFUL TO READ THE QUESTION! This is where A LOT of students take a huge wrong turn because not all essay questions ask for the same kinds of information. Some questions may ask you to list things. Others may require more thought and detailed answers. This also affects the amount of answering you will do. Questions that ask you to "analyze" or "compare" something will require more writing than questions asking you to "list", or "define" something. Is the question asking for general knowledge, or does it want to know your opinion about something? It can make a big difference.

(3) Now that you've thought a little about it, sketch out a brief outline. One way is to use topic headings, another way is to write the first sentence of each paragraph and then leave space enough underneath that first sentence to expound on the idea later.

(4) For essay questions that require thought, the first sentence should probably begin with something that gives away "your take" on the topic.  Most of the rest of it should be backing up your point of view with a few examples. Lastly, it's a good idea to summarize what you already said in the final part, making sure you restate your position that you took as clearly as possible.

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WORD PROBLEMS

For my first two years of college, I dreaded having to take physics. I knew as a biology major that I was required to endure two semesters of it, and I'd already heard all the horror stories. The main reason for my apprehension about physics was quite simply that I never did very well on word problems back in high school. I came to fear them the way many small children fear the dark.

I don't know how, exactly (perhaps I was like someone having to learn how to swim after being thrown into the deep end of a swimming pool), but I came up with a system that will help with any kind of word problem you happen to come across. It involves looking for the "core" of the problem. Here is my 3-step strategy for solving any word problem. And it does work.

(1) Every word problem, without exception, has to provide you with some information. Write down any important information it gives you on the left side of your paper. If it says it takes a locomotive 5 minutes to travel 5 km, write down t = 5 min and  d = 5 km.  (all the while remembering that you may have to change that 5 minutes into 300 seconds and 5 km to 5000 meters later on to solve the problem, though). When you get done, you should have a vertical list on the left side of the paper underneath the question. Try to remember that some of the information in the problem may be extraneous (teachers sometimes give too much information in a word problem to see if you really understand what you're doing).

(2) Every word problem has to ask for something. Find out what it is and immediately write it down with an = sign and a question mark after it. For example, if it asks how far the locomotive will travel in 60 minutes, write down  d = ? on the right side of the paper. Now you have a goal, something to aim for.  This is your target.  Now it's time for #3.

(3) Here is where it can get more interesting, because what you're really doing is going from point a to point b the easiest way you can.  Here's where you get to show what you know, so open up your toolbox. Inside your mental toolbox are all sorts of various equations and other facts you know.[29] Looking at the list on the left of knowns, and the unknown with the ? after it on the right, the correct equation will often present itself to you.  You can draw a picture of the problem in the middle so you can look at the problem from other angles if you want to. Always double-check to make sure your answer makes sense and is in the correct units.

Do this and you'll solve most word problems you'll ever come across. Make a game of it. Just as you wouldn't use a Frisbee to play soccer, you will need to use the appropriate equation. You can also think of it as hunt. You're the hunter and the answer you're after is the quarry.[30]

Tip: In math & science, teachers will often use textbooks that you are not using in the class to take questions from and put on their tests. These questions may have terminology you're not familiar with from your textbook. Be careful.

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# #7: BE AN ACTIVE LEARNER, NOT A PASSIVE OBSERVER

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KEYPOINTS:  The only way to win a race is to first sit in the driver's seat.

It sounds almost too simple. "Take charge of your own education." But what does this mean, in practice? Being an active learner is more of a mindset, or a habit, than it is a single strategy. It means rather than expecting others to tell you what you need to learn, or how to learn it, you do most of it for yourself.

Once you decide to take charge of your education, instead of simply reading a passage in a textbook, you will be more engaged with it, maybe even asking yourself questions while you're reading it. In 1661, a young Isaac Newton entered Trinity College at Cambridge. Unhappy with the textbooks provided, he took it upon himself to seek out the original works of Euclid and Descartes. Newton taught himself mathematics this way.

An interesting analogy between active learning and passive learning is with the digestive system inside your body. If all there was to digestion was chewing up your food and then swallowing it, allowing it to pass through your stomach and intestines, then nothing useful would come from it. Instead, the whole purpose of digestion is to break down the food and absorb as much of the nutrition contained in it as possible by getting it into your bloodstream so it can be carried to all the places in the body, all the cells and tissues, where it needs to go. Active learning is like digestion. Don't simply take in information. Absorb and distribute it around to different compartments in your mind. Take a moment to try and figure out where it should go and how it fits with what you already know. This is just one of many things you'll do when you start actively learning.

Active learning also means being more critical. Do you believe something just because it is in a textbook? Textbooks can have mistakes too, in fact a surprisingly lot of them.  I once came cross a science book that had a cartoon drawing of Isaac Newton dropping two balls of different sizes from the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy.[31] In fact, once a mistake gets into a textbook, they're nearly impossible to get rid of. It can end up in other textbooks because the authors of these textbooks sometimes copy problems and ideas right out of older textbooks. Always try asking yourself whether or not what you are learning rings true. Do you agree with it or not? Whether you do or don't doesn't matter as much as the fact that you are asking yourself the question.  This will develop into a habit after a while.

Being an active learner means you don't stop thinking about what you've absorbed once you finish with the lesson. You might even still be thinking about that topic during the evening while you're doing the dishes, or walking the dog.

When you finish reading a section or chapter, instead of moving on to the next one, being an active learner means stopping to think about what it is you've just been reading. After all, you've probably spent a good hour or so on it. Why not spend another five relaxing minutes simply thinking about it afterwards? Digesting it. Going at your own pace.  This is an opportunity to put things in perspective, another chance for self-testing. If you were in charge of a study group, could you explain what you've just read to another student who says he or she didn't understand it? Could you be the teacher if you had to?[32]

If you look inside an active learner's notebook, you'll probably come across all their old tests and quizzes. It's so they can review them, perhaps to find out where they've been making their mistakes. What do the questions you were wrong about on your previous tests all have in common? Can you see any patterns? If not, look a little closer.  Maybe it's just that you have a habit of not reading the question well enough to see what the teacher was actually asking. This is an easy enough problem to fix. Always remember that just one or two words can change the entire meaning of a sentence. Or maybe you didn't look at all the possible answers in a multiple-choice question before picking the best one. Or...

As you become an active learner, you'll be less likely to blame others for failure. Blaming others is the easy path and it's a trap first year college students often fall into. It is true that at some point you will have a professor (or two) who isn't very effective at teaching. The university may have hired him or her because they are good researchers, not necessarily good teachers.[33] But before you blame the teacher, are you absolutely sure there's nothing you could have done better? Are you being enough of an active learner?

Being an active learner means accepting that you don't have anyone to hold your hand anymore. It's up to you to get to class on time, to set aside an hour or two to do homework, to sit near the front row, to eat properly and to get enough sleep. In a nutshell, being an active learner is all about taking personal responsibility.

Start by asking yourself: "what do I want to take away from this" before reading a section in a textbook.....and make a habit of it. (good habits are as easy to create as bad habits) Research shows that it takes on average about 2 months before an action becomes part of your routine automatically. You can also ask yourself: "how does what I've just read fit in with what I've read previously?" "How would I construct an essay about what I've just been reading if I saw it as an essay question on a test?" Or: "why did the author put this particular topic in this chapter?" You can try having an opinion, or taking a particular position, before reading your lesson: "Will I agree or disagree with the author of this chapter?" You can have your own opinions; in fact you may need to if you're composing an answer to an essay question.[34]

After finishing a chapter, if you were the teacher, what questions would you put on a test about the material? There's a good chance some of them will actually show up on the test. When you start doing this automatically, then congratulations. You're on your way to becoming an active learner.

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# #8: YEAH, BUT CAN YOU TEACH IT?

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KEYPOINTS: The quickest way to find out whether or not you understand something is to try and teach it. You'll soon discover what it is you know and what it is you have yet to learn.[35]

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In high school and college, I was never one for study groups even though, when I did find myself in one from time to time, I found them a useful addition to my routine. People see things differently and it can be valuable to see things from a different perspective sometimes. Being in a study group also offers you the opportunity to become the teacher and get feedback, which is one of the surest ways to find out whether or not you actually understand whatever it is you've been studying. Partly because of my schedule and also because of my nature, I usually found it easier to study by myself, which is why many of the suggestions in this handbook involve imagining you're talking to someone, and the use of flashcards. My hunch is that for many students these days, with their busy schedules, it's probably not going to be easy to set aside a certain fixed time to meet with a group, so self-study becomes the only practical solution much of the time.

Teachers sometimes find it useful to write out a lesson plan. There's something almost magical that takes place in the brain when you write it down on paper. It's as if your brain is saying to itself: "Okay. They're taking the time to commit this to paper and ink with their own hand, so it must be important. It must be real." When you write something down, you've engaged more of your senses; you've made it more "tangible". Now it's something you can see and even touch, file away, or crumple it up, do whatever you want with it. Once you've written something down using your own hand, it's yours. It's become more a part of the world.

If you've bought into my advice about using flashcards, then you may have already started copying your notes from class (and even from the textbook) onto them. You've made these notes both tangible and portable at the same time. They might even have worn edges and coffee stains on them, more visual evidence that you've been actively learning. It all adds up to reinforcement for your mind. And when you no longer need to turn the flashcards over anymore to look at the answers on the back, you know you're probably ready to take the test.

They say that Einstein talked out loud to himself to better understand concepts, so it's okay to pretend you're teaching someone even if that other student is only in your imagination. It's possible that when you use your throat muscles, this stimulates the brain to make more connections by telling it that whatever you're saying is more important than simply reading it. But you might want to go somewhere so you can be alone so no one thinks you're crazy.[36]

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# #9: TAKE CARE OF YOUR BODY AND YOUR MIND WILL FOLLOW

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KEYPOINTS: Your brain is part of your body and needs nourishment, too. Listen to your body. Substitute fast food for some blueberries, cherries, or strawberries once in a while.

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A typical student in ancient Rome probably had a slave to walk him to school, carry his bread, and look out for his safety, but the bad news was that students went to school at 5 in the morning and didn't finish until sunset. Still, at least they got to have a lunch break around midday, which is when they walked home and took a nice relaxing siesta.

It seems like common sense to take care of your body so you mind will prosper, but it helps all of us to be reminded of it from time to time. One of the reasons it's believed people who get more exercise have less chance of developing dementia is that the blood supply to the brain is increased (all parts of our body are connected via the circulatory system!) when your heart is pumping faster. When you see other students abusing their bodies, it might be tempting to try it yourself since we all have a deep down desire to be part of the group. Pardon me for the cliches and mixed metaphors, but it is true that there's no such thing as a free lunch and burning the candle at both ends only makes the candle finish quicker. Get plenty of sleep, eat well, and if you are able, use caffeine in moderation.[37]

Caffeine belongs to an interesting class of natural chemicals called alkaloids and is made by plants such as coffee, tea, and coca. Some plants even spike their nectar with caffeine perhaps so that bees and butterflies will remember the scent of the flower and become more reliable pollinators for the plant in the future.  I recommend caffeine in moderation because it can be a reliable way to give yourself a mental boost.

Research has shown over and over again that the brain needs exercise no less than other parts of the body. Your brain is part of the body and it depends on your heart for blood and nutrition and oxygen.[38] It also needs variety, so exercising is a good opportunity to provide that to your brain as well. When you take a walk, you are giving your mind more stimuli, not to mention getting away from the TV and the computer. Anything out of the ordinary or routine will be a message to your brain that it needs to pay attention. Being someplace you don't usually go creates a heightened state of awareness in the brain, making it more receptive to new information. And don't forget to turn off your cell phone and take along your flashcards. You never know when you might be stuck in traffic or standing in a long, boring line somewhere.

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# #10: NEVER STOP LEARNING, EVEN AFTER THE FINAL EXAM

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KEYPONTS: Keep on tying everything together. A startling statistic: most Americans will never read another book cover-to-cover after finishing school.

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After you've become an active learner, you'll want to learn more. You will realize that in life you never really stop learning. And one of the things about having information means it's easier to accumulate even more information. It's like the small snowball that starts rolling down from the top of a mountain. The larger the ball becomes, the more snow it is able to accumulate. In science this is an example of "amplification", or in biology "a positive feedback loop". Sorry, but I just had to throw that bit of science in.

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# A PRETTY GOOD SUMMARY OF EVERYTHING SO FAR

(1) You'll remember it longer if you can somehow make it more meaningful to you.

(2) You'll remember it longer if you can visualize it as vividly as possible as a picture, and then as a series of pictures called a story.

(3) You'll remember it longer if you practice recalling it every so often and you can tie it in with something you already know, perhaps by using a metaphor or an analogy.

(4) Be a nerd. Take your flashcards along with you so you can practice in different locations. The brain responds to stimulation - new places can provide that - and it is especially receptive when all the senses are engaged (even when walking). Our brains are not computers. They're mysterious and amazing organs no one completely understands yet. So experiment around to find what works best for you.

(5) Not all tutors in ancient times believed in negative reinforcement. Some Roman teachers gave their students rewards from time to time when they did well, such as a book. While studying, reward yourself with mini-breaks (15+ min) every so often, but try to recall (without looking at your lesson!) what you've already learned as soon as you return to studying. This is all part of "becoming your own teacher".

(6) Only consider yourself prepared to take the test when you don't have to turn your flashcards over anymore to look at the answers. This is the only way I've found to know whether you're ready or not to sit down at a test.

(7) Keep learning, remembering, and tying in what you've already learned with new material, even after your semester is over. Remember that you are never finished learning and no class is ever really "done". That's how life is.

(8) Take responsibility for your own education. Be an "active learner" rather than a "passive learner". Study actively. Listen in class actively. Engage yourself as much as possible with the material. Find your own reasons to learn.  For example: you can always ask yourself a question before you begin reading a chapter and then hunt for the answer as you read through the lesson. This kind of mental activity will eventually become a habit and will place you in the mindset of the "active learner".

(9) Test-taking is like anything else in life: an opportunity to learn and improve. The more you do it, the better you'll get at it. So don't sweat it. Learn from it.

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# 84 STUDY TIPS

Pick and choose what works for you.

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Tip #1: MAKE A LIST Research has shown that when students make a simple to-do list before going to bed, they tend to accomplish more during the day. Make a study-date with yourself and put that on your list, too. Do the most difficult ones first if possible. Check off each item after finishing the task to feel a sense of accomplishment.

Tip #2: GO EASY ON THE HIGHLIGHTER  The use of highlighter pens to mark long passages in your textbook is highly over rated. It's popular with many students because it is so easy to do, but studies have shown that it doesn't really work that well. If you feel the need to use your yellow (orange or pink) highlighting pen, limit yourself to highlighting keywords (new vocabulary words, for example) and key ideas that you have a hunch might show up on a test. If you've become an "active learner", you won't simply take my word for anything. You'll already be trying out different study ideas to see for yourself what works best for you.

Tip #3: CULTIVATE YOUR OWN DICTIONARY so you can grow your vocabulary. You can make one in the back of your notebook on a few extra blank pages. Each time you come across a new word in lecture or your textbook, enter it into your dictionary, along with its definition. This is another example of "active learning".

Tip #4: MEMORY AIDS Mnemonic devices can work well for remembering some kinds of information but not so much for others. Here are some proven favorites: ROY G BIV (colors of the spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet). MVEMJSUNP (planets: My very educated mother just served us nine pizzas. Note that Pluto is considered a "dwarf planet" now). [39]

Tip #5:  REVIEWS MATTER Don't skip class, even if it's just a review session. A lot of students will not attend class if they think it's only a review day or a day when the tests get handed back. This could be your best opportunity to pick up details about the test, what you did wrong, and what it is your instructor is looking for. Each instructor is different! When I see a near-empty classroom, I sometimes give my students who bothered to show up some extra help as a kind of reward.

Tip #6: EAT LIGHT Avoid heavy foods that make you sluggish or sleepy, especially right before a test. Pay attention to your body and you'll know what foods to avoid (usually meats and cheeses. Many students favor carbs maybe because the glucose seems to give the brain an extra energy boost.).

Tip #7: ASK FOR HELP If you do happen to perform poorly on an exam, rather than feel bad, go to the instructor (office hours are best) and ask him or her how you can improve next time. At the very least, you're letting that teacher know who you are and that you care about your grade (and you might be able to take a make-up test).

Tip #8: KNOW YOUR INSTRUCTOR Each teacher or professor is an individual.  Part of your job is to get to know their unique style. This is one reason students' grades tend to go up during the course of the semester. Having an additional opportunity to understand and pick up on the nuances of your instructor is another good reason to never skip a class, even if it's a review session. Teachers may be more relaxed and willing to give help during these less formal periods.

Tip #9: ALWAYS REVIEW It might be helpful to consider yourself "always reviewing" rather than having a set-aside time for it. This is an example of the mindset I referred to earlier as "active learning" rather than "passive learning". A passive learner still expects someone to tell him or her what to do and when to do it.

Tip #10: MODERATION IS KEY In the same way you wouldn't put a second coat of paint on a wall without letting the first coat dry, or sit down to a single meal once a week, don't cram by pulling an all-nighter before an exam. Like food, information is better digested and assimilated in "meaningful chunks". The brain is an organ, like the stomach that way. It's better when it has smaller amounts that it can "wrap itself around" so to speak.[40]

Tip #11: NOT ALL TEACHERS ARE CREATED EQUAL It's a fact in academia that professors with the least status in their departments tend to get stuck teaching subjects that are the least desirable. You know, the subjects you probably wouldn't want to teach either if you were a professor. Physical chemistry was the bane of my existence, at least in part, for this very reason. One of my professors talked slowly enough, and seemed like he was being helpful, but upon reflection (towards the end of the semester!) I realized I hadn't learned a single thing from any of his lectures that wasn't already in the book.  If you find yourself gaining more understanding from reading the textbook than listening to your unenthusiastic instructor, chances are you're stuck with one of these individuals.  What can you do about it? Not much, I'm afraid, other than either doing more work yourself outside of class researching the topics, or perhaps trying to take the class again from another instructor. AN IDEA: you can ask another teacher for guidance, a teacher who sometimes teaches the same subject but isn't teaching it at the moment. They can often give you a different perspective on the problem.

Tip #12: NEATNESS COUNTS for anything that gets turned in for a grade, even if it seems like it shouldn't matter. When taking the laboratory section of organic chemistry, I had a teaching assistant who only gave A's to the students who typed their lab reports. I was writing mine out by hand but caught on eventually, unfortunately not until experiencing some significant frustration. I mistakenly assumed that understanding the experiment was the most important part. For her apparently, it wasn't.

Tip #13: NO ONE'S PERFECT It is a good idea to remind yourself from time to time that you're still learning. That's why you're in school. In many ways, learning is the same process, whether it's to play the guitar or do advanced calculus. If you hit the wrong note while learning a musical instrument, you wouldn't beat yourself up over it and call yourself stupid. The same is true for all your subjects. It's okay to make mistakes. That's usually when the best learning takes place anyway. Perhaps the number one mistake college freshmen make is to try to keep up with faster learners. People learn at different paces. Just because someone absorbs information faster does not mean they are embedding it deeper. In fact, studies show slower learning can lead to deeper understanding.

Tip #14: ASK YOURSELF A QUESTION Before reading a section in your textbook, ask yourself a question you would like answered. For example, if you're reading a story written by someone about slavery and the plantation system in 18th century America, you might ask yourself "In what ways are the writer's views tinted by the thinking of his or her times?" Or, if reading an editorial in the newspaper or online, on how the modern college experience has been influenced by social media, you might be looking for ways in which the writer is uninformed, biased, or just plain wrong.  This is a simple way of "personalizing" your lessons.  When you read critically, you give yourself more reason to be interested in the topic besides the fact that the chapter has been assigned by a teacher. Reading critically means reading not so much for facts as for meaning. This is yet another example of "active learning".

Tip #15: LOOK FOR ANALOGIES Active learners tend to keep a look out for patterns while studying. Lots of seemingly unrelated things in the world can, if you find some sort of a pattern, be compared to something else. If you understand some topic or process already, all you do is make a connection to what it is you're trying to learn. Making an analogy is like getting a hand up. An interesting example of analogies and how they can change concern the human body and mind. In the 17th century, when the world was becoming more mechanical, Rene Descartes came up with the idea that the human body could be compared to a machine and the brain was like a pump that pushed spirits of the nervous system throughout the body. During the 19th century - the age of steam - Sigmund Freud compared the way the human mind works to a steam engine in his "psychodynamics".[41] These days, the brain is more likely to be compared to a computer. The computer's hard drive is like the long-term memory of the brain, while its RAM is temporary, like our short-term memory. A significant difference is the fact that, to hang onto memories, ours need to be refreshed from time to time.  The value of analogies and metaphors is that they simplify things, but for the same reason they can also mislead you if you rely on them too strongly.[42] While both computers and brains are electrical and require energy, there are significant differences. For example, the brain is controlled by emotions and chemicals (like hormones) unlike the computer.

Tip #16: OLD-FASHIONED REPETITION Some study guides and websites these days seem to look down on repetition as a study method. This is nonsense. Whenever you have the luxury of repeating something, you're telling your brain that it's important. It's like our ancestors who lived in caves when they ate the wrong plant. Our brains are built to give more emphasis to things that we're likely to see over and over again. Why? Because your brain believes that something encountered often is probably something important.

Tip #17: SUMMARIZE IN YOUR OWN WORDS One of the best ways to take notes in class is to save a little space in the margin of your notebook so you can rewrite your notes as you go along by putting them in your own words. This space is also good for putting any questions you might want to ask the instructor later if he or she doesn't get around to it in class.

Tip #18: READ BEFORE THE LECTURE Make a habit out of doing this simple task and you'll get more out of the lecture every time. For sure. Also, skimming the ahead for a brief minute or two can allow you to form "landmarks" you can use later on to gauge your progress while you're reading the chapter in depth.

Tip #19: OVERLEARN THE MATERIAL If you're driving to the store to buy dinner, you would probably take more money than you think you'll need, just in case. The same applies to taking a test. Come to class with even more understanding than you think you'll need and you'll have more confidence and do better on the test.

Tip #20: REWARD YOURSELF ONCE IN A WHILE Just finished a chapter you've been putting off? Take a break and watch TV for 30 minutes or so, preferably something fun, or go for a walk, or read a magazine article (anything that doesn't involve much thinking). Or reward yourself with a piece of candy. Recent research shows that the reward doesn't have to be much, only something to look forward to.

Tip #21: MEDITATION IS BACKED BY SCIENCE Meditation's hot right now, especially a type called "mindfulness meditation". It can put you in the moment and if you can make a habit of it, you might even find it can change not only your grades and your mental habits, but your life as well.

Tip #22: ALONE TIME IS IMPORTANT Close the door. Go someplace quiet. Applications exist to block the Internet. Sometimes you have to be selfish with your time. When you allow yourself to daydream for short periods, research shows this can help refresh your mind.  Some students say that music helps, but it wasn't true for me. There's a good reason study is traditionally done at night. It's quieter then.[43]

Tip #23: SEPARATE NOTEBOOKS FOR SUBJECTS  Buy a notebook for each subject, preferably ones with pockets so you can keep worksheets and old tests to study from. Organization is a form of simplification and is as important as the information itself.

Tip #24: WRITING ON THE BOARD  If the instructor takes the time to put something on the board, it's safe to assume it's important enough for you to enter it into your notes. I'd be willing to bet it will show up on a test at some point.

Tip #25: READING ASSIGNMENTS In college, your instructor may not give specific reading assignments, but instead assume you are doing this on your own. This you will have to do, and as I mentioned before, try to read the chapter before going to class. Self-motivation is important. Remember: the most significant difference between an angry mob and an army is discipline.

Tip #26: MEET OR BEAT ALL DEADLINES  Your instructor probably wouldn't mind if you turn in your work early, since he or she may have a substantial amount of grading to do. It also shows initiative on your part.

Tip #27: REDUCING ANXIETY Academia can be stressful enough. You don't need to contribute to this by waiting until the last minute and then having to cram for an exam. Your brain is not a computer and you can't simply shove information into it. Studying the night before a test should feel more like a recap than a cramming session.

Tip #28: NEATNESS IN NOTES DOESN'T MATTER AS MUCH  Don't worry about how neat or messy your notes are as long as you can read them. If you're using flashcards, like I recommend, you'll be rewriting your notes onto them later on anyway.

Tip #29: DON'T SWEAT IT Test-taking is like anything else, really. The more you do it, the better you will get. Recent research has found that one of the most effective ways to improve test grades is to take practice tests often. It appears to increase memory and comprehension. Unfortunately, many teachers don't know about this yet, so you may need to find old tests to practice from on the Internet or from other students.

Tip #30: BOOK REPORTS Most of what we do and think all day is about story, and the same is true here. If you want your instructor to enjoy your book report, make it in your own words (after all, it has your name on it) and remember that even a simple 5-paragraph book report should have some sort of a story to it. The first paragraph is an introduction, which is more formal and will include the title of the book, the author, and the genera. It will also have a very short summary of the story itself and maybe even some biographical information about the author if you find that interesting enough to relate. The body of the report will contain more information to back up your point of view about the book, the story's strengths and weaknesses, including interesting quotes if it adds something to the story. This is where you'll identify the protagonists and the antagonists, the problems (or conflicts) that the story is about. The final paragraph will be a conclusion (how the conflict was resolved), and where you give your opinion. Here maybe you will explain how the main characters changed by the end of the story. If you're not especially interested in the book, you can try asking yourself a question before you begin reading, such as "would I recommend this book to someone? Why or why not?" It's also a good idea to take notes as you go along, putting them in your own words when possible. This is good practice for summarizing and is yet another of the many examples we've seen throughout this handbook for "active learning" (taking charge of your own education). Many students are somewhat timid about expressing their opinions, since we've all been trained as children to respect our elders, to remain in the background so to speak. But if you want to stand out from your peers a little more, try being as concrete in your examples of what you liked or didn't like about the book as possible. Give your teacher something interesting to think about.

Tip #31:  ESSAYS Once again, story is important. We all like stories. Your essay needs to tell your reader something interesting, but by having a thesis to focus on while you're doing it. In a nutshell, an essay is a balancing act between keeping it interesting, while keeping it focused on your thesis. Your thesis can be mentioned in the introductory paragraph, but not usually until a brief background is given stating the problem you're addressing. What is a thesis? It's a simple formula: your thesis = a particular topic + your position on that topic. Some more tips: (1) if you're apprehensive about writing an essay, pretend you're talking to one person, someone you know well, and write the same way you'd speak to them. (2) a good essay doesn't have to be long. Some can be as short as 5 paragraphs. The first is the topic paragraph(s), the last paragraph(s) is where you summarize what you've said including restating your thesis. The middle paragraphs are the body, where you expand on each of the ideas you mentioned in your introductory paragraph(s). If your essay is successful, the reader will have NO DOUBT about what your position was on the topic you chose to discuss. Be clear and be analytical, all the while remembering that you're also a storyteller.

Tip #32: SWITCHING SUBJECTS  Some research suggests that it might be better to study a little of a subject at a time, then switch to another subject. Total immersion in a single subject appears to be an overrated strategy, at least for undergraduates.

Tip #33: VISUAL AIDS Mnemonics seem to work better for things that are easily imagined. I use them, but try not to rely on them if I don't need to.

Tip #34: RE-READ THE IMPORTANT STUFF  Some research has indicated that re-reading a chapter was one of the least effective strategies. I was surprised, because for me it was one of my best strategies. I sometimes re-read a chapter, especially the summaries, two or three times until I felt comfortable I had absorbed its meaning. Re-reading worked best for me when I waited about a week before doing it. As always, do whatever works best for you.

Tip #35:  LOOK AT THE PICTURES If you have extra time and aren't in the mood to do a lot of reading, try going through your textbook and looking only at the illustrations (such as pictures, graphs, diagrams, etc). This can also be a relaxing way to get yourself interested in a subject that you're not particularly fired up about. You can even make a game of it by covering up the captions under the illustration with your hand and trying to guess why the picture is in your chapter. This is yet another example of an active learner's strategy.[44]

Tip #36: SENSE OF TOUCH  In the spirit of engaging all your senses, you can draw little check marks after each section you read while studying. This gives you a sense of accomplishment and engages the part of your brain involved in touch. Likewise, if you have your notes on your iPod, you can listen to them while you're walking. (It was noticed in the early 1900's that children who traced the alphabet with their fingers on sandpaper remembered how to draw them easier than children who hadn't traced their letters first)

Tip #37: BECOME THE SUBJECT  One of the most effective methods for studying I've found is to picture yourself as the very thing that you're studying. It takes some imagination, but it is something active learners do all the time. For example, if you're studying the circulatory system of the human body, picture yourself shrunken to the size of a red blood cell that is traveling through all the arteries, veins, chambers of the heart, etc. The more imaginative you make your journey, the more likely you'll remember the details. Picture the names of the heart's chambers as billboards on the heart's chamber walls, or maybe you can pretend you're a guide who is explaining the inner workings of the human digestive system to a group of tourists traveling through the intestines, etc.

Tip #38: GIVE YOURSELF A REASON Sometimes you need to find your own reasons for wanting to learn a subject. Maybe it's because you want to get a better job, or you just want to graduate, or...whatever your reason is.

Tip #39: ANALYTICAL OR CRITICAL Try to have a side project to keep more parts of your brain involved. For example, if you're studying something highly analytical, like algebra or trigonometry, it might help to have a project on the side that requires some relaxing creativity. Maybe your hobby is something as simple as keeping a journal, or developing a new website, or using Photoshop to improve on photos. On the other hand, if most of your work in school is creative, try doing something analytical just for fun in your spare time, like learning a foreign language or all the country locations on a world map.[45]

Tip #40: HISTORY TIMELINES Have trouble remembering dates? Take heart. You actually have it easier compared to students in ancient Rome. People in antiquity didn't have the luxury of memorizing specific years to mark important events of their past. They had to recall who the two consuls were during that time, and Rome had two new consuls every year. One way to remember dates is to pick a year (or event) you are already familiar with on a timeline and compare other events around it with that event. Was it before the event or after it?  Use your ability to make pictures out of numbers (like you learned in part 4) and memorize these one or two key dates. Now you have a frame of reference to fill in more dates, because you can compare them with each other. For example, the same year the treaty ending the Mexican-American happened, 1848, a "wave of revolutions" began in France and spread to something like 50 different nations in Europe and Latin America. Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto in London in 1848 and an important gold rush began in California. If you had to, could you use your imagination to tie all these events together into a cohesive story for 1848?

Tip #41: THE CREATIVE MIND  Much of what I've said about making up stories isn't new. You've been making images in your mind since you could walk. I deliberately didn't put any drawings or photos in this handbook.  All the images you "saw" while reading the words were created by your own mind.

Tip #42: GIVE IT THE ONCE OVER As soon as you get the test, glance over the entire test so you'll know how to budget your time. Pay special attention to the point values.  The less surprises ahead of you on a test, the better. This is also a good time to do a "mind dump", writing all the equations or other facts you had to remember on the test off to the side or on the back. I did this a lot for physics.

Tip #43: OLD TESTS ARE GOLD Some of your best study material will be old tests. Remember that every teacher is an individual and so has their own style, not only in teaching, but in how they make up their tests. Looking for patterns and getting to know how your teacher thinks is one of the most valuable things you can do during the semester.

Tip #44: DO IT YOURSELF TESTS What happens when you have no old tests to study from because your teacher doesn't provide practice tests? As an active learner, you might try making up your own practice test. The act of guessing what might be on the test is also another way of getting yourself into the material. This method works well alone, but perhaps even better in study groups, where each member contributes their own questions to provide more variety.

Tip #45: DOODLERS ARE WELCOME  Do you like to doodle? You no longer need to feel guilty because there's now good evidence that doodling is helpful with stimulating different neural pathways in your brain. And it doesn't seem to matter what it is you doodle, whether it's abstract geometric stuff like squares and triangles repeated over and over again, or more exact stuff like profiles of people or animals. Likewise, tracing over things and drawing out letters and words works too. Somehow all this helps unclutter the mind and increase focus, which may seem somewhat counterintuitive since doodling usually looks pretty cluttered itself. But it does seem to work.

Tip #46: ONE THING AT A TIME Do you remember when I discussed the usefulness of finding analogies and all the ways the human brain seems similar to a computer and some of the ways it doesn't? Well here's another way it isn't. Unlike a computer, our brains simply aren't built for multitasking. We seem to do a lot better when concentrating on one thing at a time. Skip multitasking. Multitasking can be a waste of time, and perhaps even be detrimental to learning.

Tip #47: A CLEAN SLATE Everyone makes mistakes and has to start over. When you do feel the need to start over, give yourself a mental boost by doing it on a clean sheet of paper. This can increase your focus and help unclutter your mind.

Tip #48: NO CLUTTER Some students prefer to study in their room. If you do this, try to make a habit of tidying it up before you begin. A clean room encourages a clear mind.

Tip #49: FIND YOUR ORACLE  Out of ideas? Try finding your own personal "oracle". An oracle can help jog you out of your routine and encourage you to "think outside the box". In ancient Greece, when the Athenians wanted to answer a difficult question, they consulted the Oracle of Delphi. The oracle gave them hints rather than an exact answer. The Athenians still had to figure out what the oracle meant, and in the process they sometimes came up with valuable solutions they otherwise wouldn't have thought of. You can create your own oracle. One way is to find a book or magazine with plenty of pictures and open it at random. Find a picture on the page and consult it as your "oracle". Try to think about all the ways that picture is trying to lead you to a solution to your problem. For example, a student needed to come up with an idea for a fundraising project when he stumbles upon a beautiful photo of a Golden Retriever fetching a bird in a lake. After some thought, he comes up with the idea of having a dog washing fundraiser. It turns out to be a hit because everyone else had been doing car washes and his project seemed fresher.

Tip #50: THE INFORMATION AGE If you're stumped, try checking YouTube for videos on the topic to get ideas. You can also Google search terms to look for study guides, practice tests, and worksheets, that other students have put online. If you're tempted to plagiarize a book report or essay that's already been written, don't do it. Teachers seem to have a 6th sense when it comes to detecting when a student has handed in an assignment they haven't done themselves. Online flashcards can be made at Quizlet.com However, I recommend making your own flashcards because working with your hands engages your brain.

Tip #51: FOCUS ON THE UNKNOWN While it's tempting to focus on things you already know, since this tends to build confidence, don't waste too much time doing it. Instead, concentrate more on the things you don't know.

Tip #52:  DON'T SKIP SUMMARIES  Chapter summaries can be very useful for getting a general idea of what will be covered, as well as was already covered. Some students find it helpful to read the chapter summary before reading the whole chapter, just to get an idea of what they'll be reading. Forewarned is forearmed. I often re-read chapter summaries just before taking a test.

Tip #53: ONE LAST GLANCE If it is getting close to test time and you are still not confident in remembering names, take a quick glance at all the names on your study sheet or flashcards one last time so that, if they do appear on a test, they will look familiar to you.

Tip #54: PERSONALIZE A NOTEBOOK  Another way to think like an active learner is to construct your own personalized notebooks. You can make dividers to separate your topics. Buy some a binder, some tabs, scotch tape, and a hole punch.

Tip #55: MUSIC OR SILENCE?  The age-old question when it comes to studying. I didn't usually listen to music when studying, but some students say it helps block outside distractions. The horror writer Stephen King locks himself in a small room and listens to loud rock music when he composes his novels. The key apparently is choosing the right kind of music to go with your subject. For math, listening to classical music seems to be better because there are no lyrics to distract you, while indie music that is artsy seems to help when you need to be creative, such as English composition class.[46]

Tip #56: SEND THE RIGHT MESSAGES Wearing pajamas while studying could send the wrong message to your brain that you're ready to go to sleep. It might be more beneficial to dress up, even if you're by yourself in your room.

Tip #57: STUDY BUDDY You may find having a study buddy in your room helpful if it feels too empty. It can be a pet, or even a plant.  When I was taking botany lab, we had to grow and nurture seedlings into full-grown plants. Then we had to cut them up. A few of the students became so attached to their plants that the instructor started giving away little cacti as company. Some students claimed having it on their desk back in their dorm helped them to study.

Tip #58: TAKE CONTROL The main goal of an essay is to "get the reader on your turf", so to speak. Let them learn your language and experience the issue from your point of view. This means taking control of the content of your message. There should be no doubt in the reader's mind where you stand on the issue by the time they finish reading your essay.

Tip #59: GET THE BLOOD FLOWING Some students say that doing light exercise right before a test helps because it stimulates blood flow (and therefore oxygen and glucose) to the brain. As a biologist, I tend to agree that this idea might have some merit. A light jog or some calisthenics probably can't hurt. It doesn't have to be a full workout. As for me, walking around outside and getting some fresh air in a wide-open space helped relax me before a test.

Tip #60: COLOR CODE IF IT HELPS  While taking a test, it might help to use different color pens to categorize different levels of importance in a test question.[47] You can choose which color matters to you and come up with your own criteria for using that color. For example, you could use red to underline anything that is a question in your notes, yellow for definitions, conclusions in green, etc. Using highlighter pens to color code key information in your notes and textbook is probably a better use for them than simply highlighting long passages.

Tip #61: LEARN IN LECTURE When taking notes, students sometimes make the mistake of trying to copy down everything the teacher is saying. What you'll end up with is another lesson you have to learn when you look at your notes again later on. Instead, make note-taking a tool to increase learning as you're listening to the lecture. This forces you to learn the material in the classroom rather than later on and is another characteristic of an active learner.  If you're doing this, then conclusions will be more important to copy down rather than raw facts alone. You could even write your notes in a question and answer format. Q: How is light different from matter? A: light has no mass.

Tip #62: SEE IT OFTEN  Some students find it helpful to see their notes the very first thing in the morning. You could buy a small dry erase board, attach it to your bathroom mirror, and write important facts, lists, definitions, etc, on it the night before.

Tip #63: CREATE A GAME to get out of a study rut. You could cut up a sheet of paper into strips and write various tasks you need to do that day, such as "learn 10 nouns in Spanish" or "read pages 44-59 in history". Then, fold them and put them into a cup. Draw each out of the cup one at a time and do whatever it says. You can even put small rewards on slips, such as: take a "10 minute break", "check your email" or "go for a quick walk"

Tip #64: OPEN SESAME Hang a pen and piece of paper with problems to solve, or words to define, etc on you bedroom door so that each time you enter or leave your room, you are required to solve a problem or recall a word.

Tip #65: TREAT YOURSELF Not all your rewards have to be material, like a piece of chocolate or a video game. Looking forward to something can be as simple as getting your less interesting, more challenging subjects out of the way first when sitting down to study, saving the ones you enjoy for last.

Tip #66: OPPOSITES ATTRACT When making your flashcards, don't forget to write the questions and answers on opposite sides of the card! You'd be amazed at how many students I've seen putting them on the same side. If you're an active learner, you don't want the answers to be so easily available. You want to have to "work" for them.

Tip #67: SPICE IT UP You may have noticed that I worked some history into this study handbook. It's partly because I've found over the years that incorporating history makes just about any subject I'm working on more interesting. You can find ways to make your subjects more interesting, too. The main reason Leonardo da Vinci studied birds and human anatomy wasn't because he wanted to make a name for himself in science, but because he was an artist and wanted his drawings and paintings to look more realistic. Isaac Newton is best known as a physicist, but he was equally interested in religion and tried to predict when the world would end by uncovering hidden messages in the Bible. He even believed in magic (like other alchemists of his day) and spent a good deal of his time and effort trying to turn lead into gold. The moral? Put those outside interests of yours to good use by incorporating them into other aspects of your life...like studying.

Tip #68: BE A DOG, NOT A WOLF  One of the most valuable human traits is our ability for self-discipline. People who work with wolves have remarked that the main psychological difference between a dog and a wolf is that the wolf can never understand the simplest word in the English language, which is "no". The ability to self-regulate can feel like a burden, but it's a burden that actually carries with it great rewards, such as civilization. So keep those study dates you set with yourself.

Tip #69: GAINING CONFIDENCE Don't be surprised if you find yourself using these simple memorization techniques less and less as you progress in your studies. As students begin using them and see their grades increase, they often gain more confidence in their ability to memorize and so rely on these visualization methods less and less. But even after being out of school for over 20 years, it's still nice to know I have them to rely on in a pinch if I need them.

Tip #70: KNOWLEDGE IS CUMMULATIVE This tip may apply more to math and science than it does the humanities, but it's probably not a good idea for anyone to skip a concept you come across in the textbook if you don't understand it. Try to understand it as thoroughly as possible, from as many different angles as you can, before you move on. Why? Because so much of what you will encounter later on will be based on what you've learned earlier. Science and math textbooks especially have their chapters arranged carefully, so that later chapters (and their topics) are highly dependent on the earlier ones. So don't skip a concept believing it's not that important.  Spend some time trying to understand it, pay a visit to the professor during office hours and have it explained to you again, try to find a more effective textbook in the library, do whatever you have to do. You're bound see that troublesome concept crop up again in other chapters later on.[48]

Tip #71: SI HABLA ESPANOL? Learning a foreign language, especially a Latin-based one like Spanish or French, can help, not only with improving memory, but with reasoning out unfamiliar vocabulary words and understanding your own native tongue better.[49]

Tip #72: KNOW WHEN TO TOSS IT Just can't seem to make any sense out of your essay no matter how hard you try? Sometimes it's best to scrap it and start over. When doing this, start over with a blank sheet of paper. Nothing looks as full of potential than a piece of paper without anything on it yet. Remember that your essay, in a sense, is a story too.

Tip #73: OPPOSITES CAN BE USEFUL Another way to secure something into memory is to find its opposite relationship to something you already know. For example, I was finally able to recall the basic concepts of Daoism, China's oldest religion, by realizing that, in some ways, it teaches the opposite of Confucianism. While Confucianism is about learning correct ways of behavior to encourage social harmony, something I already was familiar with, Daoism is more about the believer finding his or her individual harmony with nature.

Tip #74: SCANNING THE ALPHABET This is a strategy you may find yourself using more and more as you get older. Can't quite recall the name of that person you're sure you know? Try scanning the alphabet by going through each letter one at a time. Picture as many names that begin with the letter A and see if any of them ring a bell, then try B, etc. This method of "one at a time" not only works with names, but other things as well. Can't remember who was president in 1957? Go through each of them from the present to the past one at a time.

Tip #75: IMPERFECT PERFECTION  Give yourself permission to write badly if you're stuck or overly nervous about your writing.  This can be a good way to jumpstart your essay or book report. Artists do this kind of thing all the time. Putting away the critical part of your brain for short periods of time can be a surprisingly liberating experience.

Tip #76: SETTING LIMITS  Having trouble getting started? Try giving yourself a strict time limit or word limit when beginning an essay. This can become a useful way to push yourself into beginning. The novelist Tom Wolfe requires himself to write10 pages a day (triple spaced) on a typewriter, no matter how long it takes him to do it.

Tip #77: SHOTGUN IT  The "Scattershot Approach" is based on putting everything in your mind about a topic down on paper regardless of how important you think it is at the time. Take a break and then come back later to see if you can use any of the pieces. If so, put them in order and expand on them.

Tip #78: THE BOTTOM UP APPROACH Nothing says you can't start in the middle or even the end of an essay if you're having trouble getting started.  You can leave the first for last and get right to the meat of the argument initially. As an analogy, it's like priming the pump with water or the engine with gasoline.

Tip #79: A NEW LOOK Another good reason for finishing your essay or book report early is so you still have time to come back in a day or two and "look at it with fresh eyes". It might be even better to have someone else look it over as well.

Tip #80: READ IT ALOUD  When you read your writing over out loud to yourself, it forces you to slow down. Then you begin to notice things (like the need for a comma, lack of logical flow, etc) that you tended to skim over when reading it silently. Abraham Lincoln said he always read his speeches aloud to himself before he gave them so he could hear the words.[50]

Tip #81: KEY POINTS Before beginning an essay or book report, first write down 3-5 key points you know you want to be sure and bring out in it. For example, if your essay is about the way television has affected modern society and you feel strongly that people watch too much news these days because of the rise of cable television and 24-hour news shows, make a note of this so you'll remember to address it later on.

Tip #82: THE SENSE OF SMELL In the spirit of using all your senses when learning, it might be beneficial to have a scented candle in your room when you study. Engaging all parts of the brain, even the olfactory nerve, while learning seems to be important for forming new connections.  If it helps to engage your muscles, chewing gum while studying might be a good idea to try too.

Tip #83: THE 1ST PARAGRAPH TEST  Does the first paragraph of your essay pass the "What? So what?" test? Does it state clearly what topic your essay is addressing and does it tell the reader why he or she should care about your topic? If so, you're ready to proceed with the rest of the essay.

Tip #84: REMOVE DISTRACTIONS and other roadblocks to active learning. Sit in front of the classroom. This way, there will be less distraction between you and your instructor.[51]

Tip #85: FOCUSED THINKING ISN'T ALWAYS NECESSARY: We humans have 2 basic modes of thinking: "focused" and "diffuse". Both are important for learning new material and problem solving. We probably evolved this way in order to survive. For example, our small mammalian ancestors needed to be able to use focused thinking while looking closely at the ground for insects to eat, but they also needed to use their more diffuse thinking to keep a lookout above them for predatory dinosaurs. Focused thinking is more for solving problems that require logic and is the less evolved mode of thinking. But even when solving a math or science problem, sometimes you need to take a step back and look at the "bigger picture", which requires "diffuse thinking". To access this part of your brain, you need to relax. Taking a deep breath and a mental step back while doing a test can help get you in the mood for diffuse thinking. The amount of time to do diffuse thinking should be just long enough to take your mind completely off the problem at hand. You want to be able to switch back and forth between these two ways of thinking as often as you need to.  It's usually easier to switch from focused mode to diffuse mode because the diffuse mode is the default mode or our brains (for example, daydreaming).  When should you switch from focused thinking to diffuse thinking? Probably the best time is when you start to feel irritated with yourself. Then it's time to relax a bit and take that step back. If you're at home, one of the things you can do is sit in a different place in the room. This can jog your brain into thinking about a problem from a different perspective. You can even try sitting on the floor in a corner. An analogy for this is a laser beam and a flashlight beam. When first looking at a problem it might be best to use the flashlight part of your brain (diffuse mode), then use the laser part to focus on it more.

Tip #87: BEWARE OF FALSE CONFIDENCE A common mistake students often make is to spend too much time practicing something they already know how to do. For example, working the same type of problem over and over instead of trying the more difficult ones.

Tip #88: HARD START JUMP TO EASY Sometimes it's to your advantage to begin a difficult question you think you may have trouble with early in the exam period. As soon as you come to a mental roadblock, stop and do some easier problems on the test. This will give your mind a chance to use your "diffuse mode" of thinking. When you return to the difficult problem, you may be able to approach it from a new angle. Suddenly, that difficult problem could look easy.

Tip #89:  OVERCOMING FEAR If you continue to have test anxiety that interferes with your ability to do your best, try this: before taking the test, write down on a piece of paper any negative feelings you might have. Seeing your fears in print can often help relieve them.

Tip #90: TAKE FREQUENT PAUSES While working on a test, it's often beneficial to take pauses both before jumping right into the new question as well as while you're working on it. Don't get locked into thinking there is only one correct way to approach a problem. There are often many different ways to solve a problem. For example, there are 367 different proofs for the Pythagorean Theorem.

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# A FEW MORE EXAMPLES

KEYPOINTS: This section is for students who feel they still need some more examples before they start putting these methods into practice. There is also a chance to do some self-testing here.

(1) ART HISTORY. I wasn't looking forward to taking this class, but of all the choices that could fulfill a humanities credit, it was the best of the worst. I think the main reason I signed up for it was because it had the word "history" in it. Our tests were visual, with the instructor putting up pictures of famous paintings or other works of art on the screen using a projector. We had to write down who the artist was, or perhaps the date of the painting, or maybe the style the artist used. There was this one impressionist painting of a boat I can still remember called The Boating Party. I had trouble remembering the artist's name until I eventually noticed that the boat had an empty bench. I pictured a cassette radio on the bench and I chose this link because, when I was a boy, my father used to place his cassette radio on the bench next to him in our rowboat. The artist's name was Mary Cassatt.[52]

(2) MEMORIZING DATES Here's how I memorized 1620, the year the Pilgrims landed in North America. 1 = t sound / 6 = ch sound / 2 = n sound / 0 = z or s sounds. How about picturing a Pilgrim (or a Native American watching them come ashore) touch their nose? Touch is 16, nose is 20.

(3) SELF TEST How would you memorize the year Julius Caesar was assassinated?  44 BC.[53]

(4) MORE FUN WITH ANALOGIES Finding an analogy can be a valuable leg up when it comes to absorbing a new concept or even details. An example of noticing an analogy I found was when I was learning about the evolution of plants in botany. Since I'd already had zoology and knew something about animal evolution, I was able to tie them both together using the following story:

When plants first began to colonize the earth 450 million years ago, the continents were more spread out, and as a result there was more habitat for plants near water. All life, both plant and animal, came originally from the sea, so it's not surprising the first steps plants took onto land were gradual.

The dominant plant life forms near coastal regions were primitive mosses, and hornworts (as still can be seen today). There's a good reason these kinds of plants evolved in wet locations. To reproduce (which is a requirement for all of life), they formed tiny spores, millions of them. Plants that make seeds, as do over 80% of plants today, hadn't evolved yet. When compared with spores, seeds are a lot more complicated and so require more energy and time to produce.

There are other advantages to making spores that are hard to ignore, and in fact plants like ferns that make spores are still quite successful. Spores are not only small and therefore cheap to make, but easily transported by wind and water (no insects needed). Ferns make spores by the millions so that one or two will be fortunate enough to land in a place conducive to survival.

Later on, plants called conifers evolved.  Pine trees are a common example. This was the dominant type of plant during the time of the dinosaurs. By the time of the Jurassic, the earth's continents had joined together, so there was a lot less coastline. This meant that, to fully colonize the land, plants needed to retain water more efficiently and they had to make seeds to reproduce. Spores just don't cut it in drier environments, especially the desert.

Next to arrive on earth were the flowering plants. Like conifers, they make seeds too, but have discovered that flowers were a good way of attracting insects and helping them reproduce by spreading pollen extremely efficiently. Compared to spores, which tend to be spread randomly by the wind, using insects to spread your DNA (in the form of pollen) is like having a guided missile at your disposal for reproduction.

One of the important advantages of seeds compared to spores are that seeds - thanks to their surrounding seed coat - are able to retain water. Seeds are also roomy enough to provide space for an embryo, which is a partially formed plant complete with tiny leaves and a stem.  You've seen them inside peanuts. Having an embryo in a seed is like providing a head start so that when the seed lands in a good spot, it can germinate. In fact, there can be so much room inside the seed that it can store food for the embryo in the form of starch. Seeds also contain minerals that the embryo needs, which is why they're so nutritious for us as a food source. An analogy for a seed is a spaceship. Both the seed and the spaceship provide protection, fuel, and room for a passenger to inhabit it.

But that's not the analogy I found so useful for remembering plant evolution. Animals did something similar when they evolved to live on land. Like plants, at one time all animals lived in water (fish even have a whole age named for them called the Devonian). And like plants, when animals first started spending time on land, they needed to stay near water. These were the amphibians, like frogs and salamanders. They had to stay near water to keep from drying out since their skins were so thin. They also reproduced in water by way of external fertilization. Without water, their eggs and sperm would dry out.

But then along came the reptiles, like today's turtles and lizards.  With their thicker skin, these animals could spend more time away from water. In fact, reptiles also fertilize their eggs internally (like we do) so they didn't need bodies of water for that either. Armed with these new water-retaining strategies, reptiles were free to colonize all the land, including the deserts.

Lastly, small mammals evolved. At first these furry creatures had to be careful of the dinosaurs, which still ruled the earth. These early mammals looked kind of like rodents do today and they spent most of their day underground where it was safer. They only came out at night to feed, which is also why most mammals today, like your dog or cat, see better at night than primates like us do.

Another advantage mammals had over both amphibians and reptiles is that they could keep their young safer by having longer gestation periods. Placental mammals spend the majority of their development inside their mothers. Even after they're born, infant mammals receive nutrition directly from their mothers in the form of milk. Now you have an animal that can not only live far from bodies of water, but can produce fully-formed young before they're even born. That's quite a leg up on the competition.

Perhaps you're seeing the analogy already.

Amphibians are analogous to the spore-forming plants that always had to stay near water. Reptiles are like the pine trees (conifers), which could hold and distribute water more efficiently with their thicker bark and seeds that held water inside. Mammals are analogous to the flowering plants, whose seeds are more developed and spent more time protected by the female plant's ovary (which is actually the fruit we eat).

Analogies are all around, just waiting to be made by forming a connection between two things, the first you already know well, the other you're in the process of learning by linking.

As for remembering the parts of the seed, I found memorization techniques like the mind palace more useful than making analogies. It can take some imagination, but even the most abstract names can be made into mental pictures. I won't go into each part, but as an example for the plumule (the part of a seed's embryo that will become the first leaves), I made a mental picture of the tiny leaves sprouting and turning into a plum tree.

(5) FINDING PATTERNS  Patterns can seem like they're everywhere you look. In the Middle Ages, people noticed a pattern in the way the Bubonic Plague was spread. People who worked with wool, for example, were more likely to get the disease than people who worked with marble or glass. We know today that the fleas that spread plague prefer to live in fur and other rough surfaces when compared to smoother ones like marble or glass.

(6) FORMULAS When I was taking physics, I had to remember for the test that power (P) equals current (I) multiplied by voltage (V), but was having trouble keeping it straight with all the other equations about electricity. When I wrote the equation out like this: P = IV it occurred to me that I could picture a patient in a hospital getting nutrition (power) through an IV needle. That made the equation much easier to keep straight.

(7) SELF TEST: Try memorizing the following list of items and numbers by making up your own story. Then test yourself later on to see if you can still remember them in their correct order. Add as much silliness and detail as you can to your mental story to make it come alive:

textbook zoo chair dog clock roof desk 32 pencils

One Possible Way: picture a textbook about zoology getting dropped on top of a chair. A dog is sleeping under the chair and he picks the textbook up in its mouth. On his way out the door, the door slams shut which knocks a clock off a wall. The clock is a Cuckoo clock, which has a roof. This clock lands on the desk, which has many pencils. M=3, N=2, therefore MaNy = 32.

(8) GET TO THE CORE OF IT:  An example of the benefit acquired from being able to recognizing the core concept in a subject is Japanese culture. By the time students accumulate enough knowledge on the subject, they often begin to notice that everything seems to be an art with the Japanese, whether it's painting, building, planting gardens, fighting, and even stealing (Japanese pickpockets are considered some of the most artful thieves in Asia). Once you recognize this, other details about culture in Japan begin to fall more easily into place in your mind.

(9) THE CELL / COUNTRY ANALOGY There is a way to remember all the different parts of a human cell by using the cell / country analogy. All countries need a boarder. So do all cells. Like the country's boarder, the cell membrane is useful for sorting things, important for keeping unwanted things (like toxins and bacteria) outside the cell and needed things (like nutrients) inside the cell. Countries, as is true for cells, would be a lot less secure without these boarders. All civilizations need energy. A country has power plants to generate electricity, while cells have mitochondria to generate ATP (chemical energy). In a similar way that electricity can provide energy to do all sorts of things (power a TV, light a room, run a fan, etc), ATP can be used by the cell to make proteins, copy its chromosomes, move from one place to another, etc. ATP is sometimes called "the energy currency of the cell" because, like money, the cell can use ATP to "pay" for everything it has to do that requires extra energy. Every country needs a capital where activities are coordinated and important decisions made. The cell has a nucleus, where all its information is stored (DNA). Countries need to manufacture goods, so they have factories. The cell has an important factory to manufacture its proteins called the endoplasmic reticulum (and ribosomes). Where would we be without the ability to recycle our waste products, like aluminum cans and banana peels? The cell has trashcans too called lysosomes (and proteasomes), where molecules that have outlived their usefulness are digested and recycled in order to make new molecules. Countries have defenses like standing armies. Cells have ways of recognizing and disrupting viruses that happen to get inside the cell. With some imagination, you can link nearly all other parts of the cell to countries and cities too.

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# BONUS: HOW TO QUIT SMOKING BY 'CHANGING THE CHANNEL'

DISCLAIMER: This method only works for someone who genuinely wants to quit smoking.

Earlier, I mentioned how there have been different analogies for how the human brain works, depending on the predominant technology of the day. In the 1800's, people like Freud believed it functioned like a steam engine. Around the turn of the century when telephones were becoming popular, the brain was likened to a telephone switchboard. In the late 1900's and early 2000's, the computer is now taking its turn as the analogy du jour. But of course all that's still not the whole story because the mind is more complicated (and simpler) than that, fortunately. In fact, a television set is a more apt analogy in some ways than the computer. Why?  Because every television set has the ability to change channels. And, remarkably, so does your mind!

Even when we sleep, we can't turn our minds off. Contrary to popular belief, meditation isn't about turning off the mind either. All we can hope to do is find something new to take what we don't want to think about's place. Magicians have taken advantage of the fact that the human mind can't concentrate on more than one thing at a time by using "misdirection" to focus their audience's attention wherever they want it. This weakness of our minds is also the main reason I don't recommend multitasking. Multitasking is not only nonproductive, it can even be detrimental at times.

What "changing the channel" really means is "finding a substitute". The new "channel" we tune into doesn't even have to be visual. It can be meditation, or any kind of music that puts you in a fresh state of mind, or reading a magazine article you've been meaning to get around to (guilty pleasures are allowed here), going to get a piece of gum or candy, watching a show on the TV that is engrossing...well you get the idea. When the urge strikes you to light up, don't do it. Instead, change the channel.

Eventually, being a nonsmoker will get easier. But the truth is, you'll probably always want a cigarette, though the craving will diminish over time. Even after quitting 30 years ago, I still dream I've been smoking a cigarette once or twice a year. In fact, it still seems so real I can sometimes taste the nicotine on my tongue when I wake up.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Wooster is a scientist, teacher, and writer. He graduated from Montana State University with a Ph.D. in biochemistry and has published research on cystic fibrosis and childhood meningitis, as well as a novel.

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Other books by David Wooster: Secret Life of the Brewer's Yeast: A Microbiology Tale The Secret Life of Water Cystic Fibrosis & the Brewer's Yeast

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Connect with him online at: http://www.facebook.com/davidwoosterphd

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[1] Unfortunately, I had to find most of them out for myself.

[2] Some things have to be tried instead of simply attempting to figure them out logically. In the Middle Ages, sailors were afraid to sail further south of the equator because they reasoned that, since it got warmer the closer you got to the equator, the oceans must be boiling by the time you reached the south pole.

[3] The reason I know this is because you have the desire and curiosity to take the time to read this book.

[4] Which probably explains why I became nearsighted from doing so much reading in graduate school.

[5] The need to hear stories is probably why myths emerged in ancient cultures. The well-known foundation myths of ancient Rome and Athens are a good example.

[6] Perhaps the earliest image is a zigzag pattern etched into a seashell 500,000 years ago.

[7] In an effort to replicate homes of the rich, they even imitated the look of marble, complete with veins and multiple vanishing points. Some paintings were made to look like windows so real they had the effect of tricking the viewer into thinking they were looking out into a real garden.

[8] Even the white paint on the walls they were working on looks fresher when compared to the other walls.

[9] Colors are another example of how the brain is able to construct "reality". Colors don't actually exist in nature, only as energy in the form of specific wavelengths of light called electromagnetic radiation. When you see colors such as blue or red, the "redness" and "blueness" are really your brain interpreting these different energy wavelengths as a color. All the colors you see around you in the world are actually a construct of your mind.

[10] Group I elements. The first 5 in order are: H, Li, Na, K, Rb.

[11] After Laugh-O-Grams finally went bankrupt, he sold his movie camera and bought a 1-way train ticket to Hollywood, California.

[12] Raccoons are omnivores, which explains why there are 20 times more of them in cities than in the wild these days.

[13] In fact, it's really the colder air surrounding the hot air balloon that "pushes up" on the balloon because, being heavier, the colder denser air feels the pull of earth's gravity more so it travels downward, and therefore gets underneath the balloon. The rise of the balloon is more like a side effect of the action that's really taking place. / Differences in density also explains why the earth has layers: an iron core in its center and an outer crust that is composed mainly of lighter rocks such as silicates. The earth's crust actually floats on the denser rock below it.

[14] Even though they lived over 3000 years apart, the "Napoleon of Ancient Egypt" Tutmosis III is analogous to Napoleon Bonaparte because both were conquering generals who embarked on many distant military campaigns.

[15] Memorization techniques I discuss later are more useful for retaining facts, but if you want something to stick in your long-term memory, it's probably better to understand the concept behind it. If you can tie things in with things you already know, they become more "secure" in your mind.

[16] When a young Albert Einstein was learning algebra, he made a game of it by imagining he was hunting and the variable, x, was his quarry. This simple trick made algebra more fun for him. It's not true, by the way, that Einstein flunked math. But it is true that he never took a liking to it, which is why he had his wife help him with the math while writing up some of his most important scientific papers.

[17] Even the word paper in English comes to us from the ancient Egyptians and who valued their papyrus for writing important stories on in the form of pictures (they believed words had magical powers).

[18] The Apollo 17 astronauts while on the moon used paper lunar maps and gray duct tape to repair their rover after it lost its fender. They used the paper to fashion a makeshift fender onto the lunar buggy so their spacesuits wouldn't get covered in moon dust. Paper's amazing stuff. Take it from a biochemist.

[19] Roman paper was made of papyrus, actually.

[20] "Reading Disentangled" was a set of phonics flashcards invented by an English educator in 1835.

[21] If you added up all the time Abraham Lincoln spent in school as a boy, it amounted to about 1 year. He was almost entirely self-educated. Now that's what I call ambition.

[22] Would you call yourself stupid for playing the wrong notes while learning to play the guitar or a piano? Then why do so many students think they're dumb just because they make a simple a mistake while learning math or science?

[23] All modern science itself is founded on a very basic and important mental tool called "the scientific method".

[24] The 4th president after Lincoln was Garfield. How would you link Garfield to the 4th item in my grandmother's house, which was her fireplace? Since men often smoked cigars in those days, maybe he's lighting his cigar using the fireplace? It's up to you. After all, from now on it will always be your story you make up.

[25] While identical twins have the same set of genes, it doesn't mean all their genes are "turned on" and working the same way. During development in the womb, one twin was on the left side of her mother, the other on the right side. Their bodies experienced different environments, even before they were born. After birth, things get even more complicated.

[26] Quintilian, a Roman educator who lived around the time of Christ, wrote: "Our minds are like our stomachs; they are whetted by the change of their food, and variety provides both with fresh appetite."

[27] No historian has ever found written evidence of a student in ancient Rome being graded for anything. There were no formal exams, but there was plenty of competition between students none-the-less.

[28] The first 4 times Americans and Russians sent rockets to the moon, they actually missed the moon entirely. Some became artificial planets and are still in orbit around the sun.

[29] Sometimes, if you have a lot of equations, dates, names, or other things to remember, you might want to do a "mind dump". As soon as you get the test, find a blank space on it to write down everything you remember that you might need later while you're taking the test.

[30] "You think Arabs are dumb? Try doing long division with Roman numerals." Kurt Vonnegut

[31] They probably meant to use Galileo instead of Newton.

[32] The strategy of students helping each other is what one-room schoolhouses of the 1800's depended on. Before American educators began incorporating the German notion of having different grade levels in the late 1800's, American students were not assigned to a particular grade. Children of different ages all learned together in the same room and they all had the same teacher. The whole system depended on the older students helping out the younger ones who were coming up.

[33] Good researchers bring in money and sometimes even fame to their university's department.

[34] In fact, when Albert Einstein was in graduate school, he had so many of his own opinions, he rubbed his professors the wrong way, which is why he wasn't able to get a good teaching job after graduating. This is also why he ended up working at a government patent office instead of a university to support his growing family. It was the only job he could get.

[35] In ancient Rome, it was often cheaper to buy a slave to teach your children at home than it was to send them away to school. There was no public education 2000 years ago.

[36] Students in ancient Rome got almost all their lessons by listening.

[37] Caffeine is valuable because, when used in moderation, it can be like turning on a light switch. Its effects are fairly predictable and you can use it as a mental boost whenever needed. Btw, except for rare occasions, I try not to drink caffeinated beverages after noon so I can still sleep at night. Why caffeine? Because we live in a world with deadlines.

[38] There are several theories about what causes aging (is it genetically programmed, or the result of a harmful environment). As a biochemist, I've come down on the side of the "if you don't use it, you'll lose it" theory. When you skip exercise and stop eating in moderation, you are basically telling your body (via hormones) that you are no longer "in the game" so to speak.

[39] This Internet site can suggest custom Mnemonics for you: http://human-factors.arc.nasa.gov/cognition/tutorials/mnemonics/

[40] It's been found recently that good sleep during the night is necessary for clearing away harmful byproducts in the brains of rodents, and it could help reduce the chances of dementia later in your life.

[41] For example, he saw anxiety as needing to escape the mind similar to the way steam in the engine escapes via a pressure relief valve.

[42] An analogy is like a metaphor because both seek to explain one thing in terms of another, but an analogy is more complex, and seeks to make a logical argument for the similarities.

[43] When I was a kid in the 1970s, there was a myth going around that plants can respond to different kinds of music. This has never been reproduced in the lab, but it is an established fact now that plants have memory. Some plants can remember what kind of weather (like drought) has occurred in the past and adjust their growth accordingly.

[44] Before the introduction of the printing press, students in Europe during the Middle Ages had to rent textbooks because they were too expensive to own.

[45] There were no foreign language classes for students in ancient Greece to take since the Greeks considered anyone who didn't speak their language to be (almost) sub-human. To the Greek ear, a person speaking a foreign language sounded like they were repeating "Bar-Bar-Bar" over and over again, and is how we get the word "barbarian".

[46] University students in Medieval Europe didn't take subjects. Their courses were given names according to which book their instructor used (for example: Cicero's Works on Rhetoric). All their lessons were taught in Latin, too.

[47] If you were allowed to write in ancient Rome, you would probably have used a quill with ink from an octopus or perhaps made from soot to copy down the works of Virgil on papyrus. Books as we know them wouldn't be invented until around the 2nd century AD, but they did have scrolls.

[48] For me, circular motion in physics was something I had to work harder at to understand for some reason, much more so than other kinds of motion.

[49] Cleopatra and Julius Caesar could communicate because both were fluent in Greek. In fact, Cleopatra was educated at the Library of Alexandra and knew at least 7 different languages.

[50] Education in ancient Greece was primarily about listening, mostly to music, or perhaps someone reading out loud poetry such as the Iliad or Odyssey. In fact, one of the main reasons for getting an advanced education after finishing primary school (at age 12) was to become a better public speaker in ancient Greece and Rome. In Athens, a student usually wasn't considered fully civilized if they couldn't play a musical instrument. We know from scraps of an ancient papyrus that Aesop's Fables was part of the teaching lesson for at least some school children in the ancient Roman Empire.

[51] At least you have a choice in desks, which is something students in ancient Rome and Greece didn't get. There were no desks. They either sat on the ground or, if they were lucky, made due with stools, chairs, and wooden benches. They kept their abacus and their wax tablets in their laps. In fact, your school in ancient times may not have been in a building. It could have been alongside a road, in a cellar, on a rooftop.

[52] Ancient Greece put more emphasis on the arts than the Romans would later on. An Athenian student around 350 BC would have been taught drawing, painting, and sculpturing in a private school (since there were no public schools). If a child learned to read and write in the ancient world, it would have automatically put them in the top 10% of the population.

[53] One way to do it would be to think of Caesar letting out a roar as Brutus stabs him. 4 = R sound, therefore RoaR is 44.

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[i] To our modern ears, the word "myth" conjures up a fictional story, but for people of classical antiquity myth didn't carry with it any of the negative connotations it has today. The Greeks called it "mythos" which was to them a way of explaining something unexplainable. For instance, the Romans used myth to explain how their capital came into existence, and used this foundation myth to provide for their culture a place in history alongside other great civilizations that came before them, like Egypt and Mesopotamia. In this way, myth in the ancient world helped encourage the development of magnificent cities that Rome and Athens would someday become, an amazing example of life imitating art.

[ii] From the excellently written and thoroughly researched book "Pompeii" by Mary Beard: "One of the puzzles in archeology of the city has been how and where the children were educated. We have plenty of evidence of writing and literacy (even practice alphabets scratched onto walls at child height), but - despite all kinds of implausible and over-optimistic identifications - there is no trace of a school as such. That is because Roman schoolmasters did not regularly operate in purpose-built premises, but would sit down with their class in any convenient location where there was some space and shade. One such location in the Amphitheatre, for it was here, on a column of its colonnade, that a schoolmaster inscribed his gratitude for payment, and by implication his frustration at the still outstanding bills: 'May those who have paid me their school fees get what they want from the gods.' . . . The paintings from the Estate of Julia Felix (in Pompeii) depict a lesson going on under the colonnade of the Forum. A man, dressed in a cloak, sporting a pointed beard, appears to be supervising three pupils who are studying tablets on their knees. Other pupils or the children's minders watch what is going on from under the colonnade. What none seem to be observing is the nasty scene to the right. One boy has had his tunic lifted to reveal his bare buttocks (or has even been stripped down to a waistband - the painting itself is not clear). Suspended on the back of another, while his feet are held tight, he is being given a good lashing. It seems a peculiarly brutal form of punishment, even by the toughest standards of the recent past, and the awkward, helpless position of the boy only serves to accentuate the cruelty. Yet interestingly, this may well have been the normal style of schoolboy beating in the ancient world."
