"How to Study " by Ron Fry : Book Review

How to Study by Ron Fry, 2005, 6th edition is a wonderful book for study techniques. The section titled "How to Read Technical Text" is particularly excellent.

Reading Purposes

1. You may be reading to grasp a certain message.
2. You may want to answer a specific question.
3. You may be reading to evaluate what you are reading.
4. You may be trying to find important details.
5. You are only interested in applying what you are reading to your task at hand.

Technical Text Reading

Concentrate on:

1. Definitions, terms, vocabulary. They are the foundations.
2. Examples. They help you consolidate your understanding.
3. Visuals. They save you a lot of work. A picture is often worth more than a thousand words.
4. Relationships e.g. classifications, contrasts, cause and effects, etc.

Tie up often. Pause and  stop to check and to solidify your understanding.

Review and solidify often, especially with definitions, examples, formulas.

"What Smart Students Know" : Book Review

What Smart Students Know by Adam Robinson, 1993 is still fresh and relevant for today students. I recommend this section in particular : "What if You Get Confused while Reading?"

What to Focus while Reading?

1. Purpose


2. Your existing knowledge


3. The big picture


4. Key ideas, definitions, terms


5. Your summary


6. Your organization


7. Your mental picture


8. Your hook/cue/mnemonics

What if You Get Confused while Reading?

1. Return to the big picture.


2. Backtrack. Retrace your steps to note the wrong turns you've taken.


3. Jump to the end


4. Find an example.


5. Skip it!

Concepts

1. Definitions


2. Examples


3. Relationships

How to Organize

1. Ways to compare


2. Similarities and differences


3. Dependency, order, relationships etc

Kinds of Hooks or Mnemonics

1. Pictures


2. Patterns


3. Rhymes


4. Stories

Problem Solving

imitate -----------> understand
what --------------> why

1. Guess, trial and error. Play around.


2. Approximate.


3. Try extreme cases


4. Try special or general cases


5. Restate or re-formulate the problem.


6. Remind yourself of similar problems, or some relevant/related concepts


7. Reconstruct the problem in smaller or simpler ways. Our favorite trick.

Study Smarter, Not Harder : Book Review

Today I am reviewing Study Smarter, Not Harder by Kevin Paul, 2009, 3rd edition. The book has a lot of useful tips for students at all levels.

First all of, here come tow major findings from the book.

1. No stress, full emotions ----------> good learning
2. Meditation ---> Gamma waves ---> good learning

Memory

Causes of good memory are :

1. Learning through multi-senses, multi-channels e.g. see, hear, do, touch, smell
2. Similarity
3. Association, links
4. Emotions
5. Intensity, vividness, sharpness
6. Repetitions
7. Mnemonics
8. Chunking: primacy effect (you remember most what you notice first), recency effect (you remember most what you notice most recently.)
9. Linkage
10. Reviews: After every hour, After every half day, After every whole day.

Stages of Reading

1. Read clues to know what to expect, what to look for, what to focus.
2. Slow reading to facilitate real, deep learning
3. Summarize and sketch.

Taking Lecture Notes

1. Key words, in your own words.
2. Key patterns
3. Diagrams, graphs.
4. Flexible, non-linear arrows to link points.
5. Spaces to fill later: With what you might have missed, With our own insights, etc.

If You Have to Cram, Cram Five Days in Advance

1. Focus on the possible. Cut back your ambitions.
2. Try to do just 2 new topics per day.
3. Practice output activities i.e. write, speak, present, demo etc.
4. Stop new input as the target date nears.

"How to Win at College"

"How to Win at College," by Cal Newport, 2005, is full of useful and practical tips for students. Here I share tips on Time Management, When to Quit and Memory.

Time management

1. Block out obligations.
2. Assign hour-long blocks to specific projects.
3. Set aside at least one block for slack and emergencies.
4. When knocked off your schedule, re-organize your blocks.
5. Time blocking is more effective than daily todo lists.

When to quit

Define "Productive" as efficiently accomplishable and in a reasonable amount of time.

If you're sure you won't be able to solve it without outside/extra information/help,

or if you can't specify a time frame within which you will be able to solve it,

or if you've put in a long time but you are still unable to finish it off,

then, you should give up.

Memory

1. Quiz and Recall : Make yourself recall specific information.
2. While reviewing or reading, jot down your recall questions.
3. Then, quiz.
4. Then, articulate with emotions, using multi-senses etc.

This Quiz and Recall technique has the same effect as TDD (Test-Driven Development) or TFD (Test-First Development) in software development. You are very clear about your objectives and you are also very clear about whether you've made it or not.

"How to Be a High School Superstar" : Play Some Politics

"How to Be a High School Superstar," by Cal Newport, 2010, is a wonderful book.

I am surprised to find that this book discusses politics unwittingly. These superstars know how to play politics at a premature age!

Step 1: Cut back

Have a stop-work point e.g. In my Graduate school, I stopped all forms of study at 4:00 p.m sharp.
Reduce your study time so that you get more time for other steps below, for instance.

Step 2: Explore

1. Experience interesting stuffs: people, places, events, especially. communities that are well-known but little-understood and that still have open roles.
2. Deconstruct a success path.
3. Pursue something hard to mentally simulate, but not that hard to execute. By the way "Parkinson Rule," Book 3, said this a lot better.
4. Have patience if you can't have faith. Don't think, just believe you'll have it.

Step 3: Focus

Review and reduce your goal list to just 1 or 2 "deep interests."
Litmus test: Does that excite you on a weekend morning?

Step 4: Execute

1. In your chosen community, pay your dues first, get political buy-in first.
2. Get good: Give up your assumptions, learn from the successful. Immerse.
3. Do what the Community Elders recommend/suggest/offer. Or just add a tiny bit of the new in something already existing.
4. Sequence your objectives in terms of achievability. "Underdog Advantage" said this better in many ways.

  

Real Fun Begins -- The Customers -- Part 1

Learning is easy, you are just window-shopping what others are up to and consuming what you fancy.  Producing is different, there you have to make some effort and what you produce may not have any taker. Endowed with an almost inexhaustible amount of laziness, our team never suffers from solutions that then need to go looking for problems.

Maybe Relentless, maybe some other books on Japanese marketing. It says that a small market segment you've found in your locale, most likely exist in other parts of the Globe as well.

Guy Kawaski, maybe in The Art of the Start,  keeps saying that the customer of One is a lot better than 100 market research reports!

Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank, a Nobel Peace Prize winning microfinance organization and community development bank, was once asked in an entrepreneurial program by an aspiring social entrepreneur, about where to begin with her rather ambitious project. He replied that his gradually-big project began with just "one woman who was trying to escape from loan sharks"!

I, by instincts and by hard-won experience, know  that if one person truly enjoys your snacks, they stand a very good chance of doing well town-wide, then region-wide and so on.

This is exciting and fun! I've got more than one customer!

Of course, I won't be able to satisfy even this one customer completely, right now. ( My resources will have to grow in response. They will.)

But, who, which company  has satisfied you completely? Google? Apple?

This is exciting and fun!

We're Having Fun -- The Competitions

We are having fun despite the numerous competitions. Conventional wisdom has it that when you are small, you choose what others can but will not do, and when your have grown big, you do what others cannot do. We are blurred about what others will or will not do. We are only clear that so many teams can easily do whatever we are planning to do. Encouraging?

We think so and we are having fun, right now.

A few 4 or 5 years back, I met a skinny, nerd-looking kid browsing the Computer book shelves in the Jurong East library, holding a big red book (Wrox Professional series) on PHP in his chest. I chatted up with him and learned that he's been doing some programming for his CCA, sort of hobby/club-like thing in primary and secondary schools in Singapore. Since then, I cannot count how many school kids I've seen with iPad programming,  iPhone programming, C, C++, Java, javascript, HTML5, Python etc.

A few 4 or 5 years back, I read in the newspapers about an app that an ITE team had done to win a competition. That app integrated so many different mobile technologies! To give a big picture for those outside Singapore, the pecking order of Education here in Singapore is like:

secondary schools -> ITE -> junior college or polytechnic --> university and so on
secondary schools ----------> junior college or polytechnic --> university and so on

The kids are a lot savvier than me about tech!!!

The same holds true for kids in Myanmar! Malaysia! Vietnam! Indonesia! Huh ...

They can easily do whatever we are planning to do. Encouraging?

Let's Consider Another "Friendlier" Competition

My son's English seems a lot better than mine in many aspects. He's a funny kid with interest in lots of things --- time machine, time travels included. His dad, I am funny in my own ways and with my own funny interests --- thought experiments included.

So let's put my son in our English major honors class about 20 years back. 20 years back, my English must have been really poor, my "cultural deficit"(one of our teachers' remark on my lack of knowledge about English songs and movies!) was about 99.99%, listening and speaking may be about 25% and so on.

So, what will be his total scores? I am a bit harsh, I gave him F+p9.

Our teachers, Professor Daw EJ Kangyi,  , Professor U Han Tin, , Professor U Thi Ha, Professor Daw Khin Lay Myint, and other lecturers are all noted for their "generosity of spirit". Still with their personal and professional integrity, they wouldn't give him more than F+p3 or F+p5.

"F+p5" means "Fail but with potential to pass in 5 years' time."

His English is good. But he won't understand why Othello was so prone to jealousy, why Mrs Bennett was so eager to marry off her girls to rich gents, why Milton lost and regained paradise, how so easily Mark Antony could turn a population against Caesar's assassins, why Lamb dreamed of "Dream Children," why langauge policy cannot be decided with Chomsky and Halliday and science alone, and so on.

In techno field too, we have apps to sort one's necktie collection, games where one tries to unroll a toilet roll faster than another player, apps which help you count how many pets you have and so on.

Just last month, we read in Harvard Business Review about Big Bang Disruption. Hey, this is in HBR, written and vetted mostly by business profs.

Are such disruptions so fast and furious?

At least Peter Drucker, Steve Jobs, and Amazon disagree. According to these bumpkins and simpletons and ignoramus, we have about 20 to 30 to wait till such disruptions catch up with us!

So, we are having fun. If we chose, we could even wait. We won't wait though ;-)

Even primary kids can do what we do better than us. To feel it really, take a foreign language class, and see that all native pree-teens and early teens talk far better than you do. But don't stretch your conversational topics beyond Girls Generation, Psy, Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus, Halo, Crysis, Transformers etc. 

Mastery of a language means a lot more than fluency. Are all English men and women and girls and boys Shakespeare or Jane Austen or Arthur Conan Doyle or Bernard Shaw?

You get it now.

So, we are having fun.