1. Replace memory with understanding
Many people know that lessons that are understood are easier to remember. But understanding is not actually an aid to memory - understanding is a substitute for memory. Memorizing theories not only makes it difficult to remember them accurately: when it comes time to apply them, memorizing them doesn't help at all. After understanding the basic concepts and meanings of the theory, you will suddenly feel that your memory is like a god.
The reason is very simple. If you understand something, you don’t need to memorize it by rote. But there are different depths of theoretical understanding,
and different levels of accuracy. The deeper and more accurate the understanding, the clearer the memory, and the easier it will be to apply it.
Therefore, reading must be thorough - the connection between different theoretical focuses must be clear; it must be thorough - the evolution of concepts or principles must be clear.
Making significant progress in these areas is easy and requires no extra time on the part of the student. As long as he can change three bad habits, he will be a completely different person within a year.
The first bad habit is to copy notes "crazy" during class. Notes are secondary, even dispensable.
This is because copying notes has an irremediable shortcoming - copying notes during lectures is too distracting! Copying down things you don't understand
while neglecting to concentrate on understanding the speaker's key points is not worth the gain. I'm sure this is a bad habit among Hong Kong students. For example, several times I deliberately wrote obvious mistakes on the blackboard, but no one among the 200 students noticed. They just kept their heads down and copied the mistakes on their notes.
Notes serve two purposes. ① Write down the key points of what you understand. But if you feel that just taking down the main points is distracting, you should give up taking notes. Once you understand what the speaker said, you will never forget it within a few days. Many speakers
information can be found in books, and those that are not in books can be taken up after class. The difference between the teacher and the owner of the book is that the former is alive and the latter is dead. Attending class is mainly about learning the teacher’s ideological reasoning methods
. ②If you don’t understand something in class and it’s difficult to ask questions when you see so many classmates, you can use notes to write down the unclear points and ask the teacher or classmates after class. In other words, it is more important to write down what you don’t understand than to write down what you understand.
The second bad habit is to read each topic in the course separately and ignore the
relationship between topics. Therefore, understanding cannot be integrated. In order to prepare for the exam, students should read each topic separately,
Keep in mind that as soon as you see the test question, no matter what the question is, as long as it seems to be related to a certain topic, you will "turn on the water",
< p>Hopefully "hit" - This is the second most obvious example of bad habit.To change this bad habit, you need to spend time after reading a certain topic, or a certain chapter in the book, or even a certain section in the chapter that can
stand alone. Spend some time thinking about the relationship between sections, chapters, or topics. If you can understand a little bit about these necessary connections, your understanding will grow by leaps and bounds. This is because within the scope of any academic discipline, humans simply don’t know much. If you read it separately, you will find it too much and difficult to remember.
But if you read it together, you will find that there is much less to remember. Any academic study is based on several units that complement each other
It is formed and then drives ever-changing applications. The better you study, the more basic you know. If you ignore the coherence between topics
, you will not be able to get in.
The third bad habit, which mainly refers to college students, is that when choosing courses, they only want to choose teachers who are easier or who teach
beautifully. In fact, after deciding on a certain department, the selection of courses should be based on the teacher's profound knowledge, and nothing else matters.
Learning from a master and getting one or two out of ten is far better than learning from a mediocre person and getting eighty-nine out of ten.
This is because the various subjects separated in any academic discipline all lead to the same goal through different paths.
The growth of understanding is to know the similarities, not to demand the differences. Unless teachers have considerable skills, they cannot inspire students to find general theories between different subjects.
2. Interest is ignited by the concentration of thoughts
We all know that we will read better in subjects that we are interested in. But interest cannot be cultivated. Only if you always want to concentrate on a certain subject can you generate interest. What can be developed is the ability to concentrate. No matter what the subject is, no matter how far it is from your interests, as long as you can concentrate on it, your interest will be born.
Looking at a book for hours without paying attention is far inferior to dozens of minutes of full concentration. Students who think they don't have enough time to read do so because they don't have enough concentration. Even if you are studying in college, it is enough to be able to concentrate for two or three hours after class every day.
Developing concentration is also very simple. First, allocate time - the time for reading does not need to be long,
but it must be consistent. You should not study at a time when you know you will be interrupted. Second, try to stay away from books when you are not planning to study - "hungry for books" can enhance your concentration when reading. Third, if you feel a little reluctant when reading, you should simply stop reading and wait for a time when you are in a better mood - being tired of reading is a big taboo. Remember, as long as you can concentrate, reading takes very little time.
Put a watch on your desk. Look at your watch first, then start reading or doing homework. If you find that you can often
not remember the existence of a watch within 30 minutes, your concentration has been improved. If you can completely forget about foreign objects for more than an hour every time you read, you don't have to worry about your concentration.
3. Questions are more important than answers
The reason why many students are afraid of asking questions is because they are afraid that teachers or classmates will think that their questions are too shallow or too stupid, which will make people laugh.
But learning without asking is not real learning. The first golden rule when asking questions is to have a thick skin! No matter how simple the question is
if you don’t understand, just ask; no matter who can give you the answer, you can ask.
No question is ever too shallow. On the contrary, many important discoveries in academic circles are made by asking a few simple questions. Academic progress often relies on blind punches to kill old masters. The reason why many scholars who do advanced research want to teach is because young students can often ask shallow questions that a person who knows too much cannot ask. Although there is no such thing as asking too lightly, there are countless stupid questions
to name a few. An important purpose of studying is to learn which questions are stupid or redundant. If you don't ask questions,
it will be difficult to learn the secrets.
Because there are so many students, the teacher cannot spend a lot of time with each student. Serious students should make preparations before publishing. This time is an important process in studying. Confucius said it well: "Knowing is
knowing, not knowing is not knowing, that is knowing!" The easiest way to distinguish between "knowing" and "not knowing" is to ask questions
preparation work. There are roughly three steps in this preparation -
First, problems can be divided into three categories - A. "What" (What), B. "How to do"
(How?), C, "why" (why). Students must first determine what category the problem is. Category A
Category B asks about facts: Category B asks about methods: Category C asks about theories. Once the question is determined as to what type
students should immediately know what their "unknown" is, thus avoiding confusion. If you want to ask questions that fall into more than one category, separate the questions into categories. This point can reveal one's own "ignorance". Second, try to add characteristics to the problem. In other words, the point you have to ask is that the sharper, the better. Third, before asking the teacher, students should first ask themselves whether the answer to the question can be easily found in the book. If so, the teacher's time should not be spent. Generally speaking, if you use the above steps to ask questions, you can easily find the answers
by yourself. If you still need to ask the teacher, your preparation before asking the question will make him think that you are a child to teach.
4. Read the book in three parts - general idea, details, and key points
Students sit down in front of the book, pick up a ruler, and use color pens to add underlines and other emphasis marks. After reading it once,
every line is marked. This is destroying the book, not reading. The book should be read in three parts.
The first reading is fast reading, reading the general idea, but trying to know what the chapter is about. Speed ??reading means
turning pages and skipping reading; reading words instead of whole sentences in order to get a general impression. Once you get used to it, the speed can be astonishingly fast. To read the general idea, the effect of turning over two or three times quickly is better than turning over once neither fast nor slow.
The second reading is slow reading, reading details to make sure you understand the content. In this second reading, you can use pencil to mark question marks in the margins of the page if you don't understand it, but other underlines or marks cannot be used.
The third reading is optional reading, reading the key points. Emphasis marks are not added until the last step, because the key points can only be selected after careful reading. The main reason why you need to read it twice first is that if you don't go through one fast and one slow, you will easily choose the wrong key points. In college, choosing books to read is extremely important
. A good book or article should be re-read again and again; an ordinary quick read is enough.
First-class students in graduate school often spend more time choosing reading materials than studying.
Although the reading methods I suggested above focus on college students, most of them are also suitable for primary and secondary school students.
Spend one or two years developing these reading habits since childhood, and you will find that the joy of reading is difficult to explain to outsiders.