How to Read Difficult Stuffs

When you have to read difficult stuffs, remember this useful advice, by Geraldine Price and Pat Maier in Effective Study Skills, 2007, page. 271.

1. You should "assess the knowledge you bring to" the text you're using now. Is your background knowledge, prior knowledge sufficient for the reading task at hand?
2. Instead of persisting too much, too long, you should switch to "a text which gives you more help and briefer, more broad-stroke explanations." They give as examples: Idiot's Guides, "A" level texts (the authors are writing for university students.) Their special examples are Sattre and Heidegger. My examples are early-day linguistic books and Java, Visual C++ books in the late 1990s . Such books were written before the fields were mature and thus the authors themselves were unsure of their knowledge. In other words, they were bluffing. This happens in every field of study though.
3. How to Be a High School Superstar, by Cal Newport, 2010 : Read a different textbook.

The key lesson here is : Find something more digestible for you.

If the going gets really tough, here is another advice, by Heather Cooke in Success with Mathematics, 2003, page 37-38.

1. "try to do it [a worked example] yourself without looking at the book's solution"
2. "To understand something new, ... write it down ... "
3. Write out a difficult passage.

The key lesson here is : Slow down, take your time, relax.

Here is another advice, by Peter Levin in Conquer Study Stress, 2007.

1. Regard reading as a treasure hunt: Look for clues, checking our their helpfulness, and keeping your main aim in mind all the time.
2. Read breadth-first. Skim for the gist, scan for key details.
3. Take notes breadth-first.

One more advice from Take Notes by Ron Fry, 1997, for reading technical texts.

1. Backtrack a lot as you must expect a lot of wrong turns. Go trail and error mode.
2. Slow down and tie up what you've just read and understood.
3. Translate formulas, numbers etc into different words. Explain your understanding to a toy or a friend.
4. Sketch, draw, doodle.
5. Play around to uncover different paths to the solution.

From something we've read:

1. casual reading : newspapers, friendly personal mails, sales letters etc.
2. careful reading: reports, poetry, science texts
3. slow reading : technical articles. Here, you pause a lot more often, and you consolidate your intermediate understandings more often.

Consolidate What You've Just Read

In one experiment, the researchers divided the students into 2 groups:
(a) 25 % time spent in reading + 75 % time in reciting
(b) 100% in reading

Group A fare better than the Group B in the tests that followed the reading period.

Taking Breaks During Your Study

Secrets of Getting Better Grades, by Brian Marshall, 2002, 2nd edition.

After every 15 minutes of study, take a 2-min break.
After every 50 minutes, take a 10-min break (same as in "How to Win at College," by Cal Newport, 2005.)
After every 3 hours, take  a half-hour break ("How to Be a High School Superstar," by Cal Newport, 2010 )

Ace Any Test, by Ron Fry, 2000, 4th edition.

1. Study when you are fresh.
2. Use time blocking.
3. For a psychological boost, reduce the pile of books, papers etc into simple notes.

How to Win at College, by Cal Newport, 2005.

1. Keep a work-progress journal. Every night, jot down scheduled and actual accomplishments. This practice helps to hold you accountable and to hurt your ego.
2. Relax at least half an hour before you go to bed.

Proven Memory Principles

Mike Evans, in How to Pass Your Exams, 3rd edition, 2009, recommends developing your memory through active revision:

1. Make sense of the key ideas in what you read or hear.
2. Recall and review periodically.

How to Be a High School Superstar, by Cal Newport, 2010 endorses the same approach:

1. Quiz yourself and answer loud.

Memory Principles at HopeHero Software Works

1. Arouse desire for what you want to remember.
2. Chunk and encapsulate. If necessary reformat the input.
3. Make sense, find meaning, relate new materials to your existing knowledge..
4. Make a cue to easily re-activate what you've just remembered. e.g mental pictures, mental movies, tunes, rhymes, acronyms, etc.
5. Recite. Practice active recall.
6. Use it, apply it in real life.
7. Avoid distraction, intervention, interference.
8. Rest and sleep properly.

Types of memory

1. Audio loop e.g the way you remember phone numbers.
2. Imagery, pictures, snapshots
3. Episodic, films, movie-like events
4. Semantic, symbolic, verbal, language-related.

We will elaborate on each of these principles later.

Reading Math

When you have to read math textbooks, workbooks etc, remember this useful advice, by Randall S. Hansen and Katherine Hansen in Idiot's Guide to Study Skills, published in 2008. I lifted the following points from page. 130.

1. Read in order. When you find something tough or confusing, the usual culprit is that your have skipped over some points before this one. Go back and study those points in detail, and then come back to the current problem set.
2. Pay attention to illustrations, formulas, proofs, theorems, definitions, etc. These save you a lot of explorations that you will otherwise have to do on your own.
3. Work the sample/example/practice problems.

Learning Styles --- Part 1

Can I change my style? Can I improve my style? Can I learn or acquire a new style? Which style is best for what learning task? Don't ask a good question. Because scholars, researchers, book writer usually leave them for you yourself to answer!

What Styles Are There?

1. Left-brained, right-brained?
2. Prefer to see, hear or do?visual,auditory,reading/writing-preference,
   kinesthetic/tactile?
3. Deep vs surface
4. Holistic/Integrative vs atomistic/itemized
5. Single/alone vs team/social/cooperative learning
6. Converger,Diverger,Assimilator,Accommodator
7. Field Dependent or Independent
8. Concrete or Abstract

"What is my style?"
"Do we have more than one style?"
"Can I change my style?"
"Can I improve my style?"
"Can I learn or acquire a new style?"
"Which style is best for what task?"

As I have warned you before,  you yourself will have to to answer these very good, and useful questions.

We'll come up with more help in later posts on this blog.

Success with Mathematics : Mindfulness, Zen and Feelings

Heather Cooke's Success with Mathematics, 2003

page 100-101
Pin down your fleeting and ephemeral thoughts and possibilities.
Stabilize them: "What do I know?" "What do I want?" "I wonder if ...." "Maybe ...?"
Writing them down helps you clarify them,
And it affords you an easier access to them again later.

page 99, 101
Wait before you draw/sketch.
Wait before you have formed an image in your mind.

page 101, 103
Try an example to detect a pattern.
Try something smaller, simpler, more restricted, more special, or partial or auxiliary.

page 106
Vary many aspects to get a sense of the original question.
Vary many aspects to recognize variants in future.
e.g. What aspects can be changed?
What is the range/scope of variation?
In what ways can a given aspect be changed?

When Stuck?

1. Ask "Why stuck?" What do you already know? What do you still want? Can you bridge between the known and the unknown/wanted?


2. Simplify: Break it down. Substitute simpler/easier words or numbers.


3. What else do you think you need? kind of information? from of information?


4. Say it out loud or talk to a toy.


5. Use the given/worked solution a bit.


6. Take a break, do something very different.


7. Skip, later studies may help.


8. After you have solved something that got you stuck for a while, do post-mortem.
   1.What helped to get you going again?
   2.What led you to getting stuck in the first place?

Zen in the Art of SAT

By Matt Bardin and Susan Fine, 2005.
They suggest walking through the open door, swiftly and with confidence. "The open door" is a metaphor for those "pieces of the puzzle that make sense" to you right now. You should try them one at a time, and do only what comes easily to you.

Find More to Study Less

Find More

"Find More" means "finding more meaning in what you see, hear, or read". When a lesson makes sense to you, you can remember it with less effort, you can apply it with less effort to solve a problem, and thus you can get higher marks with less effort.

Books and teachers will make effort to help you understand. But it is your duty to put in this effort. If you don't understand a thing, don't force it down your brain. Refuse to do so. Einstein refused, Watson(DNA discoverer) refused, many great scientists and almost all great business people refused too.

If a book can't help you understand, change to a different book.

If a teacher can't help you understand, change to a different teacher.

Words are not much help, explanations are not much help. Let your child feel, see, hear, smell, taste what it is really like to understand, to find meaning.

Exercise 1.
1 .Let him/her read this list for 1 minute and then ask him to recall them. There are 12 items in the list.
Feb, p6, Holland, pen, p4, pencil, Spain, paper, Germany, January, p5, March.

2. Show him/her read this list for 1 minute and then ask him to recall them again.
(pen, pencil, paper), (p4, p5,p6), (Spain, Holland, Germany), (January, Feb, March).

3. Show him/her read this list for 1 minute and then ask him to recall them again.
(pen, pencil, paper), (upper primary classes ), (Spain, Holland, Germany), (first 3 months).
Or
(pen, pencil, paper), (upper primary classes ), (this world cup 1st, 2nd, third winners), (first 3 months).

4. Ask: Why does the step 3 become easy?

Exercise 2.
1. Ask them to memorize this table.
100    200
300    600
700    1400

2. Tell them that (1) first column has only 3 digits (2) first column begins with the smallest 3-digit number i.e 100 (3) second column is twice of the first. (4) 200 + 100 => 300 and 600 + 100 => 700.

3. Ask them if it has become easier to remember and if so, why?

Exercise 3.
1 .Let him/her read this dialog for 20 seconds and then ask him to explain it in his/her own words.
A: Do you have children?
B: 2 kids in primary school.
A: That's fine. Do you have any pet?
B: 3 pets. 2 dogs and a snake.
A: Oh, sorry.

2 . Tell him/her that Speaker A is a landlady and B is a potential tennant. Let him/her re-read the dialog
for 20 seconds. Then ask him/her to explain it in his/her own words again.

3. Ask: Why has the task become easier?

Exercise 4.
1. Teach this formula very quickly.
train A going to the right with a km/h
train B going to the right with b km/h
train A and B are d km apart when they start
Then,
the time they will meet/pass each other = d/(a+b)

2. Ask them to solve such a problem under "Speed" topic in P 6 maths. Are they ok?

3. This is what happened in one class where the teacher gave no formula at first.

|--------------------- 200km ------------------|
|--------------------- when? -------------------|
9 a.m. A ------> when? <------B 9.a.m
20 km/h                                        60 km/h

They were given no formula. Most of them got stuck/stumped.
Only then, after 2 or 3 minutes, they were reminded to make/find their own formula.
So, they made a similar but smaller, simpler problem/case of their own, like :

|------------------- 20km -----------------|
|------------------ when? -----------------|
9 a.m. A ------> when? <------B 9.a.m
4 km/h                                    5 km/h

They were reminded again: "Sometimes smaller numbers help. Sometimes they don't. If stuck in the same type of problem, change the type, change the nature of the problem."
One student came up with this problem, like :

|----------------------------- 9.am ------------------------------|
<--- 1hr at 6 km/h      9.am        1hr at 4 km/h  ---->
|------------------ total time = 1 hr    ------------------------|
|----------------   total distance = 10 km    ----------------|

Then, that student again turned the problem into opposite direction, like:

|--------------------------------- 10 km ---------------------------------|
|-------------------------------------------------------------------------|
9 a.m.  ------------------------------------------------------  9 a.m.
|----1hr at 4 km/h ------> met in 1 hr <------ 1hr at 6 km//h---|

10 km, 4 km/h, 6 km/h, 1 hr???
10/(4+6) = 1 ???
distance apart / two speeds = time to meet ???
Because they were a bit tired, the teacher confirmed their formula instead of asking them to verify it with another example.

4. Which class, the first or the second, do you think have a better chance of recalling and applying the formula in different situations? Which have a better chance of solving things future?

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