Category Archives: College Skills: Get Your A Out of College.

Schooling is a big pain in the neck and almost always is a waste of time, time that could be spent educating ourselves. We all know the difference. Our spirits demand that we live in the realms of gold — in rich, full life, not in the dreary, dust-laden halls of second-hand wisdom. No one else can liberate your spirit, but you can. And you already know how.

You will find reminders here, of powers you already have for educating yourself and a strategy you already know all about. I call it The Mess-Around Method. You can use it to dispatch school work fast. You can use it, too, to figure out how to do anything at all.

The best part is you already know how to do this. This is just a reminder.
Let me know how you like it.

Memorizing: The Mess-Around Strategy

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Sandbox Learning

Get Your A Book

Don’t try to memorize anything up front.  That’s not natural.  It is natural to start out by fiddling around with whatever you’re trying to figure out.

While you’re playing, things will start to click and to fall into a pattern that makes sense.

 

The mind uses patterns to connect bits and pieces into meaning.

Keep on playing and at some point you will say, “I see.”  And a bit later, “I really do understand this.”

Iimagesf you browse through now, you will find there is hardly anything left to memorize.  The data have been magically caught in your memory net, and the whole process will actually have been fun.

What’s left is for your boss or teacher – whatever details they may want you to recall.

Here’s the Mess-Around-Method for Memorizing in a nutshell:

 

● Play around until you understand.

● Check for leftovers.

● Digest the leftovers.

 

Too Simple?

That’s the process you’ve been using all your life – effortlessly.

 

You pay attention; you are never passive.

 

It’s a matter of allowing your nature to guide you and trusting that it does the work.

It always has.

— Use the force, Luke

Memory: What Schools Really Test

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Remembering, Recalling — And Good Grades

Get Your A Book
I will describe in later  posts ways to retrieve information that are natural and effective.  But first here are some things to think about.

Do you believe intelligence, talent, hard work, and honesty are what get you good grades? Your experience tells you otherwise.  Some schools may value thinking and learning, but

What’s tested is how good you are at remembering things.

It takes time and involvement and care to find out how well students are truly coming along, but those ways take time and involvement and care. It’s lots easier just to test for a bunch of data.  (If a teacher really wanted to know how a student was doing in chemistry, he could ask her.)

Most teachers test for facts.

And of course if you want to recall raw facts, you will need some memory strategies. When was the last time anyone bothered to show you how to get good at that?

How the Game Is Rigged

What’s tested and graded is skill in dredging up information –  remembering, recalling.

If schools actually did emphasize understanding, the facts would fall naturally into meaning networks and would be easy to recall.  That’s how you learned all the stuff you have stored in your nervous system – no sweat.  But most teachers expect you to remember facts – the vocabulary of the subject mostly – and never bother to show you how.  Of course, if all students were good at the memory game, it would spoil the ranking system; everyone would get high scores.

Dutiful students spend most of their time trying to remember and usually doing a rotten job of it.  That’s because, although ordinary brains are expert at learning and remembering, storing raw data is unnatural.  It can be done and easily, but it requires conscious awareness of how memory works.  Most students have had little or no education on memorizing – even though it’s more vital to school success than anything else.  Yet,

Even a little attention to memory processes gives you a powerful advantage.

Here’s one rotten technique you can toss out right away: Passive repetition.

Saying something over and over again numbs the mind.  The results are disappointing and depressing .  Relaxing over late-night TV would prepare you better for a test than two hours of passive repetition.

All You Really Need to Know About Memorizing

You have an excellent memory, and you use it effectively most of the time.
If you have trouble with a school subject, you are most likely trying to master it in a way that’s unnatural to you.OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Natural memory works well only in a warm and friendly environment.  Fear or pride or force will shut down the process.

Remind yourself of what really works for you, use it when working on school subjects, and you will have the same success that enables you to function so well out of school.  The more conscious you are of how you actually do learn and the more you trust yourself to do the right thing, the more fun you will have with school subjects and the easier it will be to master them.

Your methods are uniquely your own, but they are a variation of the Mess-Around method that I will describe in my next post.

 

Realms of Gold: Your Piece of the Pie

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Any GPA You Want

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAHomecoming         Get Your A Book
The poem of creation
 surging  in the brain’s
 electric circuitry,
 engulfing the soul
  in music.   

 

 

Here’s a preposterous statement you will agree with once you think about it.

If you are reading this sentence,

You are perfectly capable of achieving any GPA you want –

and of doing whatever you need to do or want to do in your life.

People can do anything they need to do, lift the car off their child pinned beneath it, walk a tightrope, climb El Capitan, hook up the DVD player, sing at Carnegie Hall.  If there is such a thing as higher intelligence – and the definition of intelligence is up for grabs – it doesn’t seem to have much to do with getting things done.

Will and need and circumstance are much more powerful than intelligence.

Each human being has his or her piece of the intelligence pie. 

 So do lilies, spiders, cells and quartz crystals.  Each of us processes information in our own way, from our own unique aspect of the continuum.

Individuals with down syndrome – as well as everyone in  the entire range of human physical and mind configuration – have a special window on the world.  Each of us.  Together, with the rest of the intelligent universe, we complete the pie.

 

Our job is to be who we are.

When we use our natural traits, we can do amazing things.

 winging the heavens on a updraft,
            scratching fleas.
            spinning verbal webs,
            and webs of silk.

Memorizing School-Game Trivia

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YOUR BRILLIANT MIND

Get Your A Book

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Memory Inventory

Mark only the ideas you agree with.  Then read the commentary that follows.

☐   1.  Intelligent people have better memories.
☐   2.  Memorizing requires effort and discipline.
☐   3.  Memorizing is a logical, step-by-step process.
☐   4.  Grownups have better memory techniques than children.
☐  5.  Memorizing must be conscious and purposeful.
☐   6.  Students are not graded on their memory skills.
☐   7.  The more time spent, the more remembered.
☐   8.   Remembering something requires saying it over and over.
☐   9.  Memorizing should be vigorous and aggressive, not laid back and random.
☐ 10.  Some subjects are harder to memorize than others.

Commentary

If you took my little “test” on how good you are at the school game (February 6, 2013), you know the test-maker (me) thinks none of those ten ideas is true.  In the school game, you wouldn’t check any, and you would get a good grade.  That’s how the game is played. Your views are beside the point.

The truth is, though,  that acting as if those statements in the inventory above are true will only interfere with your efforts.

Once you remember how good you are at it already, memorizing can actually be fun.  Here are some reminders.

1.  A typical human brain stores billions of bits of information – effortlessly.  The bits of extra data a flashy memory entertainer can display are insignificant compared to what all your brain – any brain – contains.

Everyone’s memory bank is about the same size.

You’ve already stored tremendous masses of data – without breaking a sweat.  If you smoothed out all the wrinkles in your wetware, you would have a three-foot-square grid, infinitely better than the smartest microchip.  You are smart, far too smart to be floored by the trivia you are asked to store while in school, most of which will be useless once you leave school, most of which you will have forgotten anyway.

Retrieving

You are also brilliant at retrieving anything of value that you’ve stored in your nervous system.  Just think what all was involved in your reading of the previous sentence.  (Reading researchers still can’t quite figure it out.)  Think what’s involved in picking up a pencil, blinking your eye.

What doubts we might have about our retaining and recalling stuff more than likely were acquired in the unnatural learning situations commonly found in schools.  Use your natural learning skills and you will be able to learn any school subject the way you’ve learned everything else in life.

Even people who are “intelligent” don’t have better memories.  

2.  Where would you be if you had had to “memorize” the more than 150,000 words stored up in your brain?  Did you sit down with lists, break a sweat, have nightmares about it?  You didn’t get up at 5 a. m. to study and lose valuable sleep poring over mountains of data.  Whatever you were doing, those methods were far superior to the puritan methods commonly pushed in schools.

Memorizing is a natural biological process – if not interfered with.

No one knows how you go about it, but the non-conscious part of your mind does know and does it routinely, – unless you or some well-meaning teachers gum up the works.    We do know some ways to set the stage for natural learning.

You can have a good time doing schoolwork and actually feel refreshed after a couple of hours at your desk.

3.  We have no certainty of what goes on during learning or memorizing, but whatever it is, learning and memorizing  seems to be anything but logical and systematic.  It doesn’t care if school keeps or not.

The process appears to start anywhere at all, go off on tangents, move back and forth between parts and the whole picture.  At some point, it sends a completed printout to our conscious minds so that we can describe in words or music or pictures or sculpture what we already know.

Our conscious mind performs valuable services.  It’s our automatic talking machine.  We can use it to deliberately set motion the non-conscious processes that figure things out.  We can write down the results.

4.  Kids have complete confidence in their wetware and don’t interfere with the excellent learning machinery they were born with.  Most adults, unless they’ve remembered how it’s really done, try to do it all with their conscious minds. Kids learn automatically.  What they learn is guided by their spirits, so they probably don’t know consciously how they pull it off.  They just do it, like breathing.

What grownups who have figured it out can do is set the process in motion –  and then relax and let it happen.

5.  Your non-conscious mind will let your conscious mind know what it ought to be doing.  And that is NOT a very orderly process.  There may be periods of intense scrutiny with abrupt changes of direction, crazy word games, going of on a side path, circling, resting, doing the dishes, sleeping on it.

If you trust your wetware, the way a child does, you will always do the right thing. 

 Believe it or not – and you will believe it once you catch on – all this messiness is the most efficient way to learn.  And learning  is a much better word for what you are up to than the word memorizing is.

6.  Oh, yes, schools do indeed reward good memory with higher grades.

 In fact, memory is the one thing that is graded. 

 Grading for most courses is based on tests.  Even short-answer tests and essays reward remembering and recalling data.  Even teachers who value understanding and growth and change don’t know how discover it.  So they resort to checking for quantities of stored data.

The greatest concern most students have is whether they will be able to remember data for a test.
The better you get at it – mostly the vocabulary of the subject –  the better your grades.  Of course, this knack has very little use off campus.  Hence, the phenomenal success of trivia games.

Remembering is the essence of the school game.  

Once you know that, it’s easy to develop the skill.  In later posts, I’ll describe some of the tricks of the trade, techniques that are easy to apply.

7.  Studying itself is no guarantee that you will remember.

 How you use your time is much more relevant. 

 If you use your study time intelligently, you can cut time spent in half – or less.  In later posts I’ll describe some ways to set up pleasant and productive study time.

Keep in mind, memory is a by-product of learning.

Understanding how we learn and remember will reduce considerably the slave labor of grinding away at books.  You will spend less and less time trying to remember, yet you will be able to recall anything you want.

8.  Rote memory, repeating something over and over,  is the poorest way to commit something to memory.

It doesn’t take long to turn what you are repeating into meaningless gibberish, and the mind simply won’t play that game.  Right?

If you are asked to store trivia, there are pleasant, intelligent ways of doing it – but not as a mantra.  

9.  We cannot bully our minds.  

If you try to brow-beat your conscious mind into doing the learning (remembering), your spirit will not allow it.   All parts of the brain must be in harmony, if you want it to work.  Sitting up straight, beating our breast and frowning will shut the whole thing down.

I remember a colleague wondered why her quiet 8:00 section scored higher on her tests than her energetic 11:00 of the same course.  It’s likely students in  the early class were closer to their natural learning state than were the more intense students.

When the mind has room to play, it in its optimum learning mode.  Not surprisingly, the setting resembles a sandbox.

10.  Getting the hang of chemistry is no different from getting the hang of driving or mixing cocktails or sorting the mail.

 There are no difficult subjects, only areas of experience more distant from our daily environment than the “easy” subjects.

If one plays around with a new subject the way a child does with new experiences, in due time the code will come into focus, and the new field will be just as easy as anything else.

The key is to know how your brain works, to relax and to allow it to do its job.

A LOOK AT THE SCHOOL GAME: How Good Are You At It?

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A Self-Test
Here’s a little self-test you can try out.  If you get 100 %, you should share your expertise with everyone you know!

 

 

Mark only the statements you agree with. Then read the commentary that follows.

☐  1.  We learn what is taught.
☐  2.  Classrooms are good places to learn.  Traditional classrooms are the best places               to learn.
☐  3. Education involves lesson plans, grades, curriculum materials, textbooks, assign-              ments,  group-paced activities, prerequisites, competition.
☐  4.  Knowing a subject well insures high grades.
☐   5.  High-school grades, college grades and scores on the SAT are good indicators                of adult  success as measured by satisfaction in life, leadership, self-acceptance,              mention in Who’s Who.
☐  6.  A teacher is someone who knows.
☐  7.  Learning is logical.  Learning is sequential.
☐  8. More than one person can be taught the same thing at the same time.
☐  9.  Learning is gathering and storing information.
☐ 10. Lectures and textbooks are the best means of transmitting information.
☐ 11. Schools provide tools for school success.
☐ 12. Schools provide tools for life success.

  Commentary on the School-Game Test

First off, if you’re good at test-taking, you will have figured out the “wanted” answers right away or certainly after a quick overview.  The test-maker (yours truly) gives away his biases early on, and once you see that, you know exactly how to ace the test.   In most tests, what you really think is beside the point.  The game is to give the response the test-maker wants.  The game is rigged.

All of the statements in the little “test” above are false.  If you do think some of the statements are true, here’s some commentary in would be in your interest to think about.

1.  What’s taught is NOT what is learned.  We learn what we do.

                                            Learning is growth and change.  

When an organism changes, when it can do something it couldn’t do before, that is learning.  Unless there is growth and change, nothing whatsoever has been learned.

In classrooms, we do learn to sit in rows or circles (or learn to rebel against this).  We learn (or don’t learn) punctuality, submission  to authority (or rebel against it), passivity, inattentiveness, self-doubt, fear, boredom.  You can make your own list.

2. . . . good places to learn things . . .?

 

Margaret Meade wrote that her grandmother wanted her to have an education, so she kept her out of school.

 

Jane Goodall knew where to go for an education.

 

From the time you were born till now, how much of your learning actually occurred in school?  Miracle of miracles,  we all, D students included, somehow or other have learned billions of things – where the sun appears each dawn and how it feels, the feeling of love, how to walk on two legs, how to tie shoes, how to go to the toilet.  And on and on.  How much of the total can be traced to schooling?  An infinitesimal speck. Even the “facts” have to be adjusted as we go along.

If learning to walk or to talk required schooling, most of us would still be in remedial classes.

If we are not interfered with, we learn effortlessly.  To master a school subject, find out how you do learn.  Then do it on purpose.

 

3.  . . . lesson plans, grades, curriculum materials, textbooks   . . . ?

Actually, there is NO connection between all that folderol and learning.  In fact, all that huffing and puffing is counterproductive.  The mind hates straitjackets and refuses to respond.

Regimented curricula make school subjects needlessly difficult.

4.  Subject mastery equals high grades?

If two people know the subject well but only one knows the school game, guess who gets the higher grade.

Mastering the school game is the best preparation for any school subject.

Understanding, seeing, growing, changing are a joy.  But grades are not awarded for them.  Grading has its own rules and must never be confused with education.

The only thing grades show is skill at getting grades.

A student could get good at algebra or physics,  but that facility is separate from getting grades.  You already knew that!

5.  Grades and life success?

Grades do reveal grade-getting skills, and SATs call for similar skills – all within the closed system.

Grades and tests have NO significance once we step off campus.

Right?

6. . . . someone who knows . . . /

     A teacher is someone who knows how to learn and is willing to do it in public.

A teacher is someone who got there before you did.  That person learns (practices the process) right out in front of everyone, warts and all, and then you can catch on.  “So THAT’S how it’s done!”

 
What with the information explosion, it hopeless for a teacher to be a fact pusher.

7.   . . . logical? . . .sequential . . . ?

     Logic and sequence come AFTER we have learned something.

A part of the brain, the non-conscious part, is capable of making sense out of information that comes in haphazardly, any which way.  Since there is no way to get in there and see how this works, institutions like schools act as if that kind of mental activity doesn’t exist.  But that’s where the action is.  Only a small part of figuring things out is conscious.  We use language to nail down what we have already discovered.

     When the conscious and non-conscious work together, schooling is actually fun.

8. Individuals in groups learn the same thing at the same time?

In any group, learning is going on constantly, but what’s learned is NEVER what a teacher has in mind.  Not even one listener will be learning what the teacher thinks is being taught.  That’s the biological nature of unique organisms.

 

Each brain contains a unique program that picks and chooses among available data and puts bits and pieces together in its own way.

 

9. , , , gathering and storing . . .

Google gathers and stores.  Wikipedia does that.  Libraries used to.  Like squirrels, people who squirrel away lots and lots of facts – with very short shelf life – will soon forget 90 percent of them.

Information is learned when it is chewed and digested.  We know it’s been a good meal when we have grown and changed.

Hardly any time in schools is spent on getting new ideas onto the nerve endings.

10. Lecturing is NOT teaching.

The mind cannot learn (process) while it is being talked at, and it can’t be fooled by stultifying prose.  It simply turns off.  It’s true that some lectures are beautiful and brilliant.  Some may be awful but presented by poetic and brilliant people.  I would go out of my way to hear either kind of speech.  But the learning would have to take place afterward – by me.  A student who tries to learn during a lecture will drive the speaker nuts.  It’s bad etiquette to try to learn while being spoken to.

Lecturing and teaching are separate activities.

11. . . . tools for school success . . .?

School success depends on memorizing, taking tests, getting the gist of  textbooks, doing assignments, taking classes .

If you want to play the school game intelligently, you need to get good at all those areas.

12. . . . life success . . . ?

There is NO relation between schooling and living a successful life. 

The kid who manages his or her own paper route or has a lawn-mowing or  housecleaning service or becomes absorbed in a meaningful hobby is far more likely to lead a fulfilling adult life than the competitive grade-getter.

Even sitting down to dinner with your family has more to do with a rich, full life than anything that happens in classrooms.

Intelligent Reading II: Textbooks and Other Dull Stuff 2

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Get Your A Book

The Assignment:  What The Boss Wants — What You Want

“Read Chapter 2”, “Read today’s emails”.

If you have any self-regard, you would not start in at the top and read every word.  But lots of students and dutiful employees do.  If you’re running the show, though, for your own purposes, the approach is quite different.

First, find out for sure what the teacher or boss wants, not what they say they want, but what they really want.  Often, they aren’t clear-headed enough themselves to know.  But if you observe what what they actually zero in on and what they choose to talk about (or test on), then you begin to catch on to what the assignment really is.  Once you know that, intelligent reading will cut wasted time dramatically.

Then, use the Mess-Around method (November 11, 2012) to dig out what they want.  BFAR — Browse, Focus, Absorb, Reinforce — (November 23, 2012) will fall naturally into the process.

Finally, decide what’s in it for you.  What do you want for yourself?  That’s pretty much a separate matter in most school- and work situations.  Hint:  You love the realms of gold.  You can convert any situation so that you can  have an exciting and joy filled time of it.

Anything wrong with the above line of reasoning?

 

 

Intelligent Reading II: Textbooks and Other Dull Stuff

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Get Your A Book

Use the the same strategy  for text assignments and bureaucratic verbiage as for reading anything intelligently (laid out my 11/23/12 post):  Mess around, which evolves into BFAR – Browse, Focus, Absorb, Reinforce.  Looking-before-leaping, is almost always a good idea.

Here are two more ways to take charge. Taking charge, of course, is what the Mess-Around method really is.  After all, unless you are some sort of a wimp, you are the one who decides what you want out of that page of print or from that long weblog.   No sane person starts in reading word for word, line by line.  Right?  How are you going to find gold if you don’t even know that’s what you’re after?

1. Read Backwards

If you have far less time than you think you need, try starting at the back of the chapter or article . . .  or whatever.  If I were you, I’d leaf through fast anyway just for an overview, but then take a look at the last paragraph or so.  The gist is often bunched in the summary. If you’re in a really big hurry, that might give you at least an overview, some idea of what the piece is all about.  Better than nothing, for sure. Busy professionals routinely look through piles of stuff one their desks that way.  Then they decide for themselves how much time they give to a piece.

And if you keep on browsing toward the front, skipping, skimming,  you may feel pretty comfortable half way through.

Reading backwards isn’t all that nutty:Reading backwards has to be active reading. It forces you to pay attention; you can’t do this passively.  You have to translate it into your own understanding as you go.  A lot of what’s in that article may be stuff you already know, so what’s new? And do you care?  You decide what you want.

This kind of messing around is  active processing of information.  The point is, if you have some system, it will work much better than if you don’t. I’d bet you already know that.  It’s your show; you’re not dominated by someone who decided to write a book – who may or may not have something to say.  You are in this for yourself, not for your teacher or your boss.

You are free to get meaning any way you can dream up.

 2.  Read the Bold Print and Look at Pictures

If you have your wits about you, this might work. Certain books don’t deserve more.  If that’s the case, this much preparation may be all you need.  Check out the bold print and  pictures.

This approach will give you the pattern of the chapter and the author’s main points. (See? That’s one of my main points, so it’s in bold print.)  You will also learn whether you may already have enough background  to supply your own supporting evidence.  No one comes totally empty-handed to any new experience, so put your own knowledge into the mix.  If the main ideas make sense to you, you may not need the author’s explanation.

But such an overview also reveals how the ideas are structured and how they are related.  So, you are forming in your mind the pattern you’ll need for storing what you find.  That’s a memory device. You’re not making a meaningless pile of  trivia.

Meanwhile, you can’t help but begin to connect the ideas you find in the print and ideas of your own.  That’s you the mind works.  Next time you try this out, watch your mind at work.

Finally, if you still have some time, a bold-print-and-picture approach will have revealed what’s still fuzzy and just where it is.  Now you can go back and mess around with that.

Make sense?

Commentary on the Slow Walk

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(If you haven’t tried out the Slow-Walk I recommended January 16, you should put off reading my commentary below.  It will spoil the fun of making your own discoveries. )

Bike Path 2

 I have traveled much in Concord.Preview Changes
– Henry David Thoreau

     At first,  walking slowly can feel awkward. We actually have to pay attention to each step we take.  That wears off rapidly, though, and then something remarkable happens. When we are “going somewhere” our focus is out ahead a few feet, but when we’re simply walking around, the focus recedes to where we are.  All of a sudden, the world becomes a vast museum of infinite wonder.  Ask any little kid. Instead of passing through the surroundings, we move in a envelope that travels with us.  Then, Thoreau, who lived out his life in Concord, Massachusetts, makes perfect sense.  And there seems to be plenty of time to get everything done.

My students used to come back from our slow walks all aglow.  When you are all aglow, you don’t care whether school keeps or not.  Right?  Witnessing our worlds seems to be sufficient.  In fact, a liberal education must surely involve a slow walk.  All of a sudden you want to write a poem.  You even understand this haiku by Onitsura:

Look! Cherry blossoms
all over! Birds have two legs!
There: Horses have four!

A Liberal Education

You can even couple the Slow-Walk with  the Surface-features Game and  the Mess-Around strategy, and you are one powerful, self-directing human being.  Is there anything wrong with that?  And what could be more practical than slow-walking algebra?  When you slow-walk algebra,  learning feels effortless.

Let me throw in a bit of Goethe here :

People seek a central point.  That is hard and not even right.  I should think a rich, manifold life, brought close to the eyes, would be enough without express tendency; which, after all, is only for the intellect.

Does this commentary hold water for you?  Let me know.

Solution to Matchstick Puzzle 2

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Puzzle:  Arrange six matchsticks to form four equilateral triangles.

I doubt you could ever get four triangles from six matchsticks on a flat surface, but the Mess-Around approach might free up the thinking so that the third dimension comes to mind. To tell you the truth, that tingle of excitement when it dawned on me that I could move into space was the real pay-off.  After that it’s sort of easy, isn’t it. I think the pleasure of realizing something, anything, is what motivates us all to get up out of bed in the morning. “I wonder what exciting is going to happen today,” as Pooh’s little friend Piglet put it.  What do you think about that?

If you can think of any other solutions to this puzzle, I’ll post them for you with pleasure.

If you like messing around with these puzzles, let me know and I’ll add some more.