Study Prof

http://calnewport.com/blog/2008/04/16/q-a-getting-into-harvard-without-getting-an-ulcer-scheduling-research-time-and-the-art-of-becoming-good/

Here’s a simple guessing game. It takes a minute or two to play, but has some very good lessons to give. Give it a try.

The fighters below–listed by their initials–are going to fight Our Hero there in the top line. They’ll go head to head in hand to hand combat. No weapons, no holds barred. Your job is to decide if our hero will win or lose against each opponent. I’ve given you the fighters’ heights and weights to help you make your decisions, and I’ll tell you that our hero will indeed win some and lose some.

Finished?

In 1993 a group of martial arts enthusiasts began the Ultimate Fighting Championship. The purpose of the UFC was to test different martial arts styles against one another to see which was most effective, and, unlike boxing, wrestling, and the like, the UFC had no size classes. That meant that sometimes small guys fought real giants. The chart you just saw lists actual fighters from the first four UFC competitions.

Our hero is a Brazilian by the name of Royce Gracie, who, starting at the age of eight, learned Jiu Jitsu from his father. Take a look at his actual record…

You can see that in match after match often against much larger opponents, Gracie won! Again and again he won, forcing the giants to surrender. His jiu jitsu training allowed him to maneuver them into chokes and joint locks from which they couldn’t escape. And notice that the few opponents who did manage to beat him or fight him to a draw were actually the smaller guys—men who had to rely on technique rather than strength. The lesson the martial arts world took away from this is that size and strength—physical advantages—can be less important than technique and skill.

In the same way master students are not necessarily the ones with the most mental muscle. Cal Newport explains this in his excellent book, How to Become a Straight-A Student; a book I highly recommend.

Newport interviewed Phi Beta Kappa honors students from a broad range of disciplines in top schools across the country. He asked them detailed questions about their study habits, questions such as, “How do you take notes in class?” and “What methods do you use to write a research paper?” As he interviewed, he threw out any students who got their excellent grades simply by grinding away hour after hour and instead looked for those students who got superior scores by using better technique and skill. The book reveals what he learned, and I’ve integrated much of his findings into this course.

The principle to take away from all this is SKILL BEATS STRENGTH, so don’t feel like a high IQ is necessary to do well in school or on a test. Learn to be a good student or test taker and you can often outperform those for whom school comes easy!

I downloaded and began using WordWeb, a free dictionary application that integrates with web resources; perfect for SAT or GRE vocabulary study. So far I really like it. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

A College Fable

Once upon a time there was a wise and wealthy king whose only son was the very model of manly magnificence. Handsome, witty, athletic, and urbane, at the mere mention of the prince’s name young maidens spontaneously burst into flames and young men took to toting around buckets of water with which to douse their sizzling sisters. Unfortunately, the prince was prone to partying and could barely be bothered with running the affairs of his father’s kingdom.

The good king despaired of ever making a worthy successor of his son. But one day, while sitting on the throne and pondering the problem of the profligate prince, he hit upon a plan of such surpassing brilliance that he clean forgot to flush.

The next day he called the young man to his garden. “Son, I have decided to reward one of my most beloved subjects with a palace of his own. And not just any palace. This palace shall be a paradise on earth, indeed fit for a king!”

The young prince scratched his perfectly cleft chin, winked at an already flaming damsel who was supposed to be mulching the petunias, and said, “A worthy gift no doubt, father, but what has this to do with me?”

Mercifully pushing the fiery maiden into a nearby fountain the king replied, “It has everything to do with you [dramatic pause here] for you shall build it!”

The prince, who could smell work like it was last week’s tuna fish, saw an end to his care-free existence and tenaciously tendered excuse after excuse to excuse him from the duty being foisted upon him, but the old king held firm. “Indeed, my son, you will build the palace, but don’t fret. You may use up to one-fifth of my wealth and my workers, and you may call upon all my advisors, architects, and engineers to make it a marvel. One final word…”

“Yes, father?”

“You shall have four years from this day to finish this task, and upon the completion of this splendid palace, [another big dramatic pause here--the king was a bit of a drama queen] you shall be crowned king!” The prince immediately perked up at that thought and hastened away to his duty.

He spent days poring over architectural diagrams and riding round the kingdom to inspect possible sites. After finding the perfect site the workers broke ground and began laying the foundations for the palace in the beginning of the first year. But the prince soon began to tire of the tedium. He came less and less to the worksite and the workmen, unsupervised and lazy, did very shoddy work indeed. Every few weeks the prince’s guilty conscience would push him into a visit. He would chide the workmen and have them fix a few of the more egregious architectural disasters, but then he would fail to show up again the next week and the cycle would begin anew.

As the end of the fourth and final year approached, the prince realized that the palace was a disaster, but by this time there was nothing to be done but try to cover up the mess. Besides, it’s not like the “beloved subject” whom the palace was for would complain. The prince would soon be king and beyond the man’s malice. He set the workmen to building fast and furious, with even less regard for quality than before. Over it all, they put tapestries and paint to disguise the weak walls and tottering staircases. With a last desperate rush, the laborers finished the palace minutes before midnight on the 365th day of the final year.

The young prince, having stayed up late with last minute fixes, arrived at his coronation ceremony bleary-eyed and unkempt. He winked at a pretty maid in the crowd, but she barely smoldered. With great pomp and circumstance the old king crowned the prince making him king of all the lands, and then he asked, “Have you completed the palace as I asked?”

“I have, father.”

“As I told you four years ago, the palace was to be a gift to my most beloved subject, and who could be more beloved than my own son! The palace is your coronation present and it shall be your royal residence.”

I wish I could tell you the prince lived happily ever after, but truth be told, the palace leaked most abominably even when it wasn’t raining, the paper thin walls offered no privacy, and the toilets had a tendency to back up at the most inconvenient times. Finally, a heavy breeze in the second year of the new king’s reign brought the whole edifice down in a heap of particle board and duct tape.

The young king spent another fifth of his wealth and another four years to rebuild the palace. But he had learned his lesson. This time he would do it right!

Your education is, of course, your own palace. You will have to live in it. Are you building it well?

This thin little tome will change your student life! While in college Cal Newport noticed that he and other straight-A students he knew didn’t necessarily study any more than anyone else, nor were they necessarily smarter. They just got better results. His book, How to Become a Straight-A Student: The Unconventional Strategies Real College Students Use to Score High While Studying Less, comes from interviews of master students from top-shelf schools across the country. In the course of his interviews he tried to identify the techniques they used to get their exceptional results; practices that average students didn’t seem to know about. His book lines out those best practices so you can add them to your tool chest. Follow the book and you will save time, de-stress, and get better grades.

Go pick up Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School, by John Medina.  It’s a very readable resource for getting the most bang from your  bean.  I especially enjoyed the section on the Jennifer Aniston neuron that we all have in our heads (no joke!).

Oops! Turns out that this chart–while it may make sense and even hold some truth–is not based on any real research. Thanks to alert reader, Ian, who let me know.

Take a careful look at this graphic (click on it for a higher resolution view), and use the power of the pyramid to beef up your studies. You can see that 24 hours after a lecture students recall only about 5% of what they heard, but by teaching others what you are learning you will recall an average of 90% of the material! Gee. Seems like I talked about teaching to learn in a previous post.

It stinks that most college classes are mainly lecture, but you can push that recall further down the pyramid by taking effective notes and reacting to the information instead of just passively capturing it.

Don’t sell this information short; this is golden!  Think; if you normally study by reading your notes, according to this graph, you’ll recall approximately 10 percent of the material 24 hours later.  Teach that same material to someone else and you will recall nine times as much 24 hours later!  Imagine how much time and effort that will save you.

Start studying this way today.  Look here for more information on using this method.

Here's a nice summary list of great memory hacks from the LifeHacker blog.  Regular perusers of this blog will recognize many of these, but there are a few useful ones on the LifeHacker list that I haven't yet written on.

Here’s a great–and very readable–article in Wired magazine about how your memory works. Part of the article focuses on the work of Piotr Wozniak, a Polish memory researcher (yes, they have those), and his memory software app, Supermemo. The man and the application are brilliant, and the app works unbelievably well, helping you to memorize large amounts of material (such as GRE/SAT vocabulary) with minimal effort and holy-moses-that’s-amazing effectiveness. Unfortunately, the software is unfriendly, byzantine, and downright ugly. Enter Mnemosyne; a kinder, gentler program that does the same thing without the pain, and it’s not only free, but opensource as well!