Here’s how to become a math whiz:

Keep working on your problem set after you get stuck.

Don’t just sit and stare at it: think hard; until you’re exhausted; then come back the next day and try again. This will be uncomfortable, but that discomfort is the feeling of your brain stretching to accommodate new abilities.

This advice came to mind recently when I received an e-mail from a high school senior. “Yesterday, I was accepted to MIT,” he began. “I’m ecstatic, but on the other hand, I’m a little nervous…I was hoping you could give me some tips.”

I explained that I had been studying theoretical computer science and mathematics at a high-level for the past decade, much of it spent right here at MIT. Over these years, one conclusion has become increasingly clear: the more hard focus you dedicate to a technical subject — be it computer science, chemistry, or physics — the better you get.

Junior graduate students think senior graduate students are smarter, but they’re not: they simply have more practice.

Senior graduate students think junior professors are smarter, but they’re not: they simply have more practice.

And so on.

When I arrived at Dartmouth, to name another example, I didn’t consider myself good at math. I had taken AB calculus during high school (not BC), and had scored a 4 on the AP exam (not a 5). By my sophomore year of college, however, I had made a name for myself by snagging the highest grade out of 70 students in an advanced discrete mathematics class. What happened in between? A lot of hard focus.

Eventually, this all becomes clear, but for an incoming freshman, it’s not intuitive. When you struggle with a calculus problem set while a classmate knocks it out in an hour, it’s easy to start to thinking that you’re just not a “math person.”

But this isn’t about natural aptitude, it’s about practice. That other student has more practice. You can catch-up, but you have to put in the hours, which brings me back to my original advice: keep working even after you get stuck.

That’s where you make up ground.

A few weeks back, on the recommendation of Ben Casnocha, I started working my way through David McCullough’s biography of a young Theodore Roosevelt: Mornings on Horseback. I was interested in the subject, but the early chapters of the book, which detail the late-19th century New York social scene, were not grabbing my attention.

Not willing to give up the endeavor, I made some changes. First, I prepared a plate of a pleasantly sharp Australian Cheddar that I had discovered on an absurd sale at our local Whole Foods. I then poured a glass of an Italian Abruzzo (a purchase inspired by my early-September visit to a vineyard in the hills outside of Bologna), and settled onto my couch — the splash of incandescent light from my reading lamp the only illumination in the room.

In this setting, my mind eased free of its previous resistance and began to absorb McCullough’s slice of life details. I found myself engaging the material in a way that just a few minutes earlier had been impossible. Something about the tang of the cheese, and the dry sweetness of the wine, supported by a creeping, yet controlled buzz, opened my mind.

This experience provoked an interesting thought: the context in which you do academic work is extremely important, yet most of us give it little consideration…

Context Matters

Here’s my reaction to this realization: the setting for your academic work is as important as your methods. 

If you’re working through class readings, tired and surronded by bored peers in a fluorescence-bathed study lounge, you’re doing yourself a grave disservice. Even if you’re deploying the most advanced study tactics, the context of your work is still weakening your results.

(Many students, I’ve discovered to my horror, are drawn to these terrible locations out of some masochistic sense that if they don’t suffer, they’re somehow slacking off. If this describe you, consider a zen overhaul to your student mindset.)

With this in mind, I charge you to give serious consideration to where you study, at what time, and with what environmental details.

For example…

• If you’re over 21, consider tackling reading assignments at a quiet, (non-student) bar, armed with a good pint. Is there any better way to tackle Scottish philosophers, or literary criticism, then with a dark stout? (If you’re at Dartmouth, try Murpheys; if you’re at Harvard or MIT, try Shay’s Wine Bar in Harvard Square).
• If you’re not over 21, try working through your reading over a good meal at an off-campus restaurant.
• Problem sets, I’ve discovered, are often best tackled on hikes. There’s something about tossing rocks into a mountain lake that shakes loose sticky insight.
• And so on…

I touched upon this concept briefly when I introduced the idea of adventure studying (which recommends awe-inspiring outdoor locations for work), and it’s implied by A* strategies such as the notebook method (which asks you to spend unstructured time with a pen and paper notebook, working through big ideas), but I want push it to become a first-order principle to consider when planning your work.

That is, you should always ask yourself:

• when am I going to study;
• for how long;
• with what strategies; and
• in what context…

If you’re aggressive and innovative in your answer to this last question — seeking the unusual and mentally-stimulating over the standard and easy — you’ll reap benefits in two crucial areas: the sophistication of your understanding, and, more importantly, your enjoyment of student life.

Leave the study lounges to the grinds and last minute slackers, and go pour a pint. College life is too short, and the material too interesting, for you to remained holed up somewhere boring…

(photo by Monster)

Welcome to Week 3

This is the third post in our four-part series 4 Weeks to a 4.0. In week one, I asked you to take control of your schedule, and in week two we overhauled your classroom notetaking. This week we advance to a crucial topic: your assignments. Nothing requires more time for an undergraduate than suffering through long readings or tackling impossible problem sets. Let’s learn how to dispatch them with maximum effectiveness.

Week 3 Assignment: Efficient Assignments

There are two major types of assignments: readings and problem sets. Below I’ve described a streamlined strategy for dealing with each. Your task this week is to adopt these approaches for dispatching your regular work.

(1) Master Reading Assignments

Let’s start with two simple ground rules:

1. Always work on your reading assignments in a quiet and isolated location — preferably far from your dorm. (Perhaps really far, when possible.)
2. Take notes on your laptop. It’s faster and the notes are neater.

For reading assignments, I want you to use the same Question/Evidence/Conclusion format we discussed in week 2. That is, for every reading, start by taking the time to identify what question is being asked and the author’s ultimate conclusion about this question.

Do this before you read the entire assignment.

Next, you need to capture some evidence to connect the question with its conclusion. How much time you spend here depends on how well you’re expected to understand the reading. If you’re going to be asked detailed questions about it on a test or in a paper, then read carefully, marking the sentences that contain relevant evidence. Once you’ve completed the entire assignment, go back and add the marked evidence to your notes — rewriting in your own words.

On the other hand, if you’re only expected to understand the basics of the article — for discussion in class, or to follow the professor better during lecture — skim much faster, marking just a few pieces of evidence that jump out. Don’t waste time trying to master every nuance.

For more information, see step 2 of part 2 of the red book.

(2) Master Problem Sets

Acing a problem set is a three step process:

1. Set aside 2 – 3 hours to solve the easy problems and attempt to solve the hard problems. The latter step is crucial. When you get stuck on a hard problem, identify exactly why you are stuck — actually spend time trying to solve it, even though it hurts your brain and is frustrating. This will make it easier to crack later.
2. Meet with your problem set group (assuming this is allowed). Try to choose a group of students who are a similar skill-level and are willing to work in advance. Avoid those goons who take pride in starting at 2 am the night before the deadline. From my experience, finding a single well-matched partner is better than a large group. Discuss the hard problems, why you’re stuck, then explore together different paths for becoming unstuck. Once again, you have to concentrate hard on the sticky problems. I know it’s difficult. But brain pain is part of becoming better at math.
3. Attend office hours. At this point, there should just be a few problems that thwart you. Furthermore, you’ve spent time with these problems alone and with your group, so you’re familar with their details. Ask your TA specific questions about these problems. Explain what you tried, where you’re stuck, and what you think you need to learn in order to get unstuck. Definitely don’t just say: “I don’t get it,” and then wait for an answer. Work with your group and your TA during office hours until you have solves all the problems. Take advantage of this momentum to finishing writing up the formal version of your problem set right there.

Notice, this technique requires that you start the first step two or three days before office hours, which are typically the night before the deadline. In other words, you have to start early. Sorry. Technical courses are hard.

For more information read this article.

Coming Up…

That’s all for week 3. If you have questions or want to report on your progress, please leave a comment on this post so the other students can learn from your experience. Next week is our final week. We’ll attack the biggest academic beast of them all: studying. So stay tuned…

Unlike many hacks you read here, the strategy I want to describe today is not designed to reduce your study time (though I don’t think it will add much to your schedule either). Instead, its purpose is to help you transform from a good student into an exceptional student.

It starts with the simplest possible tools…pen and paper.

The Notebook Method

This method applies to the following academic situations, among others…

• Writing an essay or paper.
• Working on a problem set or technical take home exam.
• Tackling a difficult book or reading assignment.
• Designing a project for a computer science or engineering class.

The idea is simple…

1. Buy a sturdy college-ruled notebook dedicated to the relevant class. (I use the 100 page, 1 subject, college-ruled Stasher by Roaring Spring, but many people also swear by the Black n’ Red.)
2. Buy a good pen. (Nothing beats a black uniball micro 0.5mm.)
3. Take your notebook and pen and go to the most relaxing, meditative, non-distracting place possible. The deep stacks of the library is okay. Hiking 30 minutes into the woods or onto the dunes overlooking a windswept springtime beach is even better.
4. Spend 1 – 3 hours working out your thinking on the task at hand in the notebook. Spend the last 20 minutes carefully summarizing your results on a clean page that you mark with the date and a title.

For example, here is a snapshot from a page of my PhD thesis notebook:

Preceding this summary page in the notebook is another few pages of rougher notes, also from today, on which I was trying to work through the tricky details of these same ideas. This final page details the polished result of this thinking. I needed to get this right, and a long afternoon with my notebook was the only way I could coax what I needed from my mind.

Inside the Method

In an age of distraction, the notebook method produces a rare commodity: high-quality thinking — the type of thinking that can make a student into a star.

Its power sources from the following truths…

1. Writing down your thoughts forces you to clarify what you’re thinking and confront ambiguities or inconsistencies. It’s hard work! You’ll probably feel painful resistance the first few times you try this method, but you must persevere. Eventually you gain familiarity with the novel sensation of deep thinking.
2. You can’t check e-mail using a spiral-bound notebook. You also can’t update your Facebook profile or tweet about your YouTube channel. If you’re high up in the library stacks, or, better yet, in the woods or on the beach, it’s just you and your notebook. Eventually your urge toward distraction will give way.
3. Paper facilitates creative thinking. You can draw arrows, and circle concepts, and sketch structures. Something about a good ballpoint scraping across a thick-grained paper stock unlocks areas of your mind that tend to hibernate when you’re slumped over your laptop in a crowded study lounge.

This method applies anywhere that requires deep creative thinking. Use it to figure out your argument for an English course, or to master organic chemistry equations, or to deduce why, exactly, that Nietzsche book frustrated you so much on your first read through.

Regardless of how you apply this method, its result will be the same. It takes you out of student survival mode and helps you down the path toward mastering the increasingly lost art of good, hard, deep thinking.

Related Posts

• Adventure Studying: An Unconventional New Approach to Exam Preparation
• An Adventure Studying Case Study
• How Two Extra Hours Can Make Your Paper Two Times Better
• Conquer Complicated Material with the Mini-Textbook Method

(Photo by Absolut1)

Calculus is easy. Or at least, it can be. The key is how you digest the material. Here’s an example: when you’re first taught derivatives in calculus class, do you remember it like this…

Or do you intuit this image…

As I will argue in this post, for any technical course — be it calculus, physics, or microeconomics — the key between an ‘A’ and a struggle comes down to this distinction. Below I’ll explain exactly what I mean and reveal how top technical students use this realization to consistently ace their classes.

How Every Technical Class is Taught

Technical classes have a simple structure. In each lecture, the professor presents a series of concepts. Depending on the difficulty of the material, she may cover anywhere from one to more than a dozen. For each concept, the professor will derive the result from concepts you already know and/or provide an example of the concept in practice.

That’s it.

This simplicity is good. It will make it easier for us to develop a strategy to conquer the material…

The Magic of Insight

What do you do with the concepts being spewed by the professor? Most students dutifully copy them down along with their accompanying examples. For example, if it’s the first week of calculus, you might record the standard derivative equation I reproduced above.

This is fine, but it’s not enough….

In addition to capture, you need to develop insight.

What do I mean by insight? That click in your brain — the moment when the tumblers of your mental locks align, the door swings opens, and an intuitive sense of what and why come flooding out. Forget the equations you copied from the blackboard, I’m talking about developing an understanding deep down in your bones.

For our example of the derivative, this might mean having a solid mental grasp of this image:

A derivative at a given point is just the slope of the tangent line that kisses that point. Even more intuitively: it can be though of as the “steepness” of the graph at that point. That’s all. The complicated equation from above is just a way to calculate a specific number that describes this steepness.

If you understand this graph — really understand it — you understand the insight behind derivatives. If all you know is the equation from above, then you’re screwed.

Insightful Studying

I am now ready to reveal the big dark secret about technical class studying: If you want to do well in a technical class all you have to do is develop insight for every single concept covered in lecture.

That’s the whole ballgame.

That’s how every high-scoring technical student does it.

There’s no shortcut.

It’s the only way.

Here’s what I commonly observe: the students who struggle in technical courses are those who skip the insight-developing phase. They capture concepts in their notes and they study by reproducing their notes. Then, when they sit down for the exam and are faced with problems that apply the ideas in novel ways, they have no idea what to do. They panic. They do poorly. They proclaim that they are “not math people.” They switch to a philosophy major.

Without insight you can’t do well.

How to Develop Insight

Developing insight can be hard. (Though it gets easier with practice.) Especially when you’re given a dozen new concepts per lecture. The implication: you have to invest a lot of effort during the semester — not just right before the exam — to keep up with a technical course. Every one of those concepts described in lecture has to be translated from symbols on a blackboard to a shiver-inducing deep comprehension. It’s not easy, but at least the challenge is now well-defined.

Here are some tips that can help:

1. If you have a hard time understanding the material as the professor presents it, prep the concepts before class by reading the textbook.
   
2. Ask questions when the professor loses you. Often their answer can knock you back on track to insightful understanding.
3. Ask the professor or TA for clarifications immediately following lecture.
4. Try to review your notes as soon as possible after class to cement insights while the information is still fresh in your brain.
5. Always go to office hours. But before you show up, spend time with the troublesome concepts trying to build insight. Figure out exactly where you get stuck. This will help the TA or professor give you targeted, useful advice. Never just say: I don’t get it.”
6. Keep a running list of every concept taught so far in the semester. Mark the ones that you have an insight for and the ones you don’t understand. It helps to see clearly exactly what insights you still need.

The Practice Factor

Once you’ve developed an insight for every concept in a technical course, the final step before a test is to do a small number of practice problems for each to practice applying it. (This is where the mega-problem sets of Straight-A come into play.)

Here’s the crucial observation: if you skip the insight-generating phase, no amount of practice problems will help you side-step exam disaster. If it’s a week before the exam, and you lack insights on most of the concepts: you’re out of luck.

It’s Not Easy, But It’s Also Not Complicated

It’s hard to do well in technical courses. But it’s not complicated.

During the semester, you have to see yourself like a lone soldier trying to fight back the tide of encroaching concepts. Do everything you can to build insights in the heat of battle. Become obsessive about conquering concepts.

Once you’ve turned your attention to the real battle needed to do well in technical classes, you can invest your time and energy exactly where it’s needed.

And if not, there’s always philosophy…

Complicated Concepts

A reader recently asked me for some study advice. He was facing an exam in a course with unusually complicated material. The concepts were numerous, and tricky to understand, and connected to each other in non-obvious ways. It was clear that there was too much information to be efficiently handled by standard quiz-and-recall, so I referred him to my favorite under-appreciated study technique: the focused cluster method.

This was still, however, not enough. As the reader was quick to observe, there was so much material connected in so many different ways that even creating a quick rapid-fire question for each key point would soon spiral out of control. There would be way too many review questions.

Fortunately, I had another technique to suggest — an approach I call the Mini-Textbook Method. It’s slower than quiz-and-recall and focused question clusters, but, for complicated classes like the one haunting this reader, it’s arguably one of the best ways to conquer the material.

It works as follows…

The Mini-Textbook Method

When faced with a course with large volumes of complicated material, reduce your notes to a collection of textbook-style chapters. Write these like a real textbook. That is, use complete sentences and logical explanations. (You don’t, however, have to waste time on making the writing “good” or, even, grammatically sound. It’s only for you.)

Your goal should be to reduce and synthesize. A good rule of thumb is to have at most one succinct chapter per each week of notes.

Things you might include in the sample chapter:

• A high-level description of the concepts covered in the chapter.
• A list of definitions.
• Good, succinct descriptions of the big ideas, theories, or frameworks.
• A discussion of how the different elements from the previous item connect or compare and contrast.

The chapter writing process itself provides a powerful review, as it helps you construct a structure that transforms copious notes into coherent and compact form that is easier to review.

The next step of the process is to construct a chapter prompt sheet for each of these chapters. On the prompt sheet, record a basic outline for the chapter.

Finally, to review, do the following. For each chapter consider the corresponding outline. Load up your favorite word processor, and, using only the outline as a guide, attempt to type, from scratch, a new draft of the textbook chapter. Don’t peek at the original chapter.

Note, your goal is not to reproduce the exact wording of your original chapter. Indeed, every time you attempt a blind writing it might read much different. The key is to make sure you coherently explain all the ideas, definitions, connections, and discussions listed on your outline.

After your done, check your result against the original chapter; just like in the quiz-and-recall method, go back and try again later if there are areas where you had trouble.

Why This Works

For classes with a large volume of complicated, interconnected material, the advantages of this method are two-fold. First, condensing the material into textbook chapters reduces the amount of information to review. A synthesized chapter will be more succinct than a long multi-page list of the type of rapid-fire questions used in a technique like the focused-cluster method.

Second, typing the sample textbook chapter can prove quicker than trying to explain things out loud.The reason: it’s easier to express complicated ideas by typing rather than speaking. With typing, you can edit sentences, and go back and rearrange your structure as needed. When speaking, on the other hand, if the concepts are tricky and connected in intricate ways, you’re prone to getting tripped up.

Use With Discretion

This technique might be overkill in many situations. For upper-level classes, however, writing your own textbook from scratch, though somewhat slow, might still be the fastest way to actually master the material.

Most college students are quick to learn the difference between skimming and reading. The former has you move your eye quickly across the page, picking up the occasional observation or idea. The latter has you actually read and process every sentence, and then try to record in your notes the salient arguments. We skim when the assignment is not too important. We read when we know we’ll later be tested on the material.

In this post, I want to teach you a third technique. One that occupies the middle ground between skimming and reading. It retains the comprehension benefits of reading while attempting, as much as possible, to achieve the speed of skimming. It’s a technique known to most upper-level humanities students; the key to taming massive reading lists without going insane. Different people call it different things. I use the term: pseudo-skimming.

It works as follows…

Pseudo-Skimming Basics

The core of the pseudo-skimming technique is to tackle the assignment paragraph by paragraph. Specifically, there are two types of paragraphs: important and filler. You only need to read the former; these hold the information that will come up in class discussion or make it onto an essay exam.

A general rule: the longer the reading, the higher percentage of filler paragraphs. This is good news. If you can identify which paragraph is which, and focus on reading only those that are important, you can significantly cut down your reading time without losing the important info missed by skimming.

The key is figuring out how to do this identification on the fly.

The Staggered Pace

The rhythm of pseudo-skimming is one of jogs and sprints. As you enter a new paragraph, you slow and read the first sentence. You ask: “what is this paragraph about?” If you get the sense that there is probably not much new meat here: abort! Jump to the start of the next paragraph, and ask the question again. Otherwise, stay the course, and actually read the damn thing.

There is a real art to this technique. You must intuit an answer to the importance question with a minimum of time. The more you read in the class, the better you’ll become at this. To help buff your skills, here are a few types of common filler:

1. A long background story. Once you recognize the importance of the story (e.g., yet another example of the artists fighting!), you can keep aborting paragraphs until the story is over.
2. Asides. If the author conducted a lot of historical research for the article, she can’t help but throw a few bits of extra information and explanations here and there. You’re not a historian. Skip!
3. Exceptions. Professional scholars worry about being definitive, so they liberally sprinkle in exceptions and caveats to their arguments. If these run long, start aborting the paragraphs.
4. Extra details. For a given idea, it is often sufficient to capture a few good pieces of evidence that supports it. If the author continues, in future paragraphs, with more details than you need, start skipping.

The Feel of Pseudo-Skimming

Once you catch the hang of pseudo-skimming, reading careful assignments takes on a different feel. There are relatively long stretches of you engaging the text, paragraph after paragraph, at a slow pace, internalizing the information. Then, suddenly, you are bounding from topic sentence to topic sentence, skipping paragraphs at a rapid rate. Wait! An important point! The pace slows again. And so on…

It may take a while to master this technique. But once you recognize the motivating idea — even for important readings not every paragraph needs to be read — you’ll find that the most beastly assignments suddenly seem a lot more manageable.

I’m currently taking a graduate seminar that assigns demanding articles of demanding length. Being somewhat busy, as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve recently been working to squeeze every last ounce of speed out of my note-taking habits. This has led me to a new note-taking approach I call the Morse Code Method. It’s engineered to be fast. Blazingly fast; yet still be able to support the type of detailed comprehension needed to survive a three-hour, 10-person discussion-based seminar.

It works as follows…

Brain Drag

Forget time for a moment. Your worst enemy when tackling a reading assignment is that weighty, sleep-inducing brain-drag that starts to grow over time, making concentration increasingly difficult. What brings this on? A big factor is halting your reading momentum. If you cease forward movement with your eyes so you can, for example, underline a few lines, or draw a bracket next to paragraph, or, dare I say it, highlight a sentence, it will require a large energy burst to get started once again. Too many such stops and starts and your brain will be fried.

The Morse Code Method is based on the following idea: you should never stop reading until you’re done with the entire article.

One continuous pass is the fastest, most energy-efficient possible way to get through a reading. It’s also the least painful.

The Dot-Dash Notation

This begs an obvious question: if you don’t stop your reading momentum, how do you make note of the important points? The answer is to deploy the following notation:

1. If you come across a sentence that seems to be laying out a big, interesting idea: draw a quick dot next to it in the margin.
2. If you come across an example or explanation that supports the previous big idea: draw a quick dash next to it in the margin.

From experimentation, I’ve learned that these dots and dashes are small enough that you can record them without breaking your reading momentum. In the end, your article will be a sequence of dots and dashes (like a Morse Code message!), effectively breaking down the reading into a useful sequence: big idea!, support, support, big idea!, support, support, support…

Processing

Once you’ve finished reading the entire article, it’s time to take notes. Review the sentences that you dotted and dashed. For the dots that still strike you as important, paraphrase the main idea in your notes, in your own words. (The paraphrase is key: it forces you to processes the idea in your brain, not just reproduce it like a photocopier). For each of the following dashes that still strikes you as important, paraphrase the example or explanation in a bullet point.

Go quick. Don’t worry about typos. Ignore fancy formatting. Just get the ideas down. As fast as possible.

Condensing

Now for the final step. This will only take you an extra couple minutes, but it’s the crucial boost that will transform you from “reasonably familiar with the readings” to “class star”:

• Reviewing what you just recorded in your notes, think for a moment about the following: What is the main question being asked in the article and what’s the conclusion the authors point toward? Record the question and conclusion in your notes.

Now you’re done. Don’t skip this last step! It is here that you pull out the big picture ideas that will form the core of class discussions, papers, and exam essay questions.

How This Compares to Classic Q/E/C Note-Taking

Fans of Straight-A might wonder how the Morse Code Method compares to the classical Question/Evidence/Conclusion approach. The answer: it’s a variation. By having you read the article before identifying a question and conclusion, the Morse Code Method better handles complicated articles with subtle arguments. Also, by having you actually read — not just skim — every sentence, you’re better prepared for more detailed discussions. When deciding what tactic to deploy, choose based on the needs of the class.

The first college course I attended at Dartmouth was a freshman English seminar titled: Popular Culture. I signed up for the course because I assumed “popular culture” meant “watching movies.” In reality, so I soon learned, it meant select readings from “cultural studies” — a field in which perfectly useful english words are re-arranged into absurdly evil, kick-in-the-groin articles that, to me, were roughly as comprehensible as Sumarian cuniform tablets. I got a C on my first paper.

Watching movies this was not…

I Am Not — Unfortunately — John Travolta

It took a few weeks for me to realize a simple truth: I am not John Travolta from the movie Phenomenon. (I’m also, it seems, not very good at relevant movie references).

If you’ll remember, in this movie John Travolta sees a bright light one night outside a tavern and subsequently develops incredible mental abilities. Among other things, he can instantly comprehend books just as fast as he can flip the pages.

I can’t do this. Probably you can’t either.

With a complicated reading, even if you go real slow, the real meaning may still elude you. The individual words all make sense, but when strung together by a professional philosopher or comparative literature scholar, they somehow evade easy association with the English language. This is what happened to me in my cultural studies class. And it’s probably happened to you too. Fortunately, there is way around this tight spot…

Pre-Processing Hard Readings

Here’s a simple system that will help you master your most difficult reading assignments. It’s a combination of the strategies I developed at Dartmouth — instigated by that freshman seminar — and those reported to me by the dozens of students I’ve talked with subsequently.

It works as follows:

1. On the day the reading is assigned ask your professor for guidance. Ask what to expect. What to look out for. And perhaps even a brief summary of the main points. Take careful notes on what she says. Print these out.
2. Google search the article title. Before diving in, type the name into Google. Look for reviews or reaction essays. You’d be surprised how often someone, somewhere has written something informative about the piece. Print these out.
3. Do a JSTOR search for more scholarly reviews or references. If the piece is reasonably well-know, a multi-purpose scholarly database like JSTOR will likely turn up some references to the work in other scholarly articles. Accompanying these references might be a few sentences of description or reaction. Print out the relevant pages.
4. Attach your printouts to the assignment. If your reading assignment is in a book, make a photocopy. If it’s in a reader, make a photocopy. If its online, print it out. Take your hard copy of the article and attach the explanatory material from the previous steps.
5. Write a pre-read summary. Before reading the assignment, carefully review the supporting materials. At the top of the document in which you’ll be taking notes, synthesize this information into a concise summary of the main points made by the article.
6. Read the article. Finally, you’re ready to dive into the article. As you read, your pre-processing should help you make better sense of what you encounter. Refer back to your supporting materials as needed. Attempt, to the best of your ability, to take standard Question/Evidence/Conclusion notes. Don’t worry if not everything you encounter makes sense.

Reviewing a Pre-Processed Article

Later, when it comes time to review the article for a paper, or a test, or a class presentation, you’ll have a crucial advantage over your peers. The pre-processing provides a framework for your own interpretation. Without this framework, it is easy to wander in the wrong direction or end up lost all together.

How Much Time Will This Cost Me!?

On average, this technique will add around 20 minutes of extra effort. (It might take more at first before you are comfortable with quickly searching and summarizing.) Clearly, we’d be steering dangerously close to grind territory if we applied this to every reading in every class. Accordingly, reserve this strategy for the truly troublesome assignments. For example, maybe you’re in a graduate course that has just one or two hard readings per week. Or, you face an assignment that you chose to write a paper on or lead the class in discussing. Under these circumstances, these extra 20 minutes will be the difference between hazy confusion and workable understanding.

In many classes, your Teaching Assistant (TA) is your most important resource. This is particularly true in technical subjects. If you establish a good relationship with the TA and ask good questions, he or she can make your life in that class significantly easier.

On the other hand, if you abuse the relationship, and badger the TA with aggressive questions, or try to weasel answers, you’ll lose this resource, and your life will become significantly more difficult.

Having spent time on both sides of the student/TA divide, I want to provide some simple rules for managing this relationship. This post lists 5 common things you should never say to your TA. Each is accompanied by an example of the right (and more effective) way to accomplish the same goal.

In your experience, what worked and what didn’t work for forming a good TA relationship?

Rule 1: Don’t say: “I don’t know how to do this problem. Help!”

TAs know that this is code for: “I spent a few minutes and the solution wasn’t immediately obvious so now I want you to give me the answer.” This pisses them off. No matter how exasperated you act, they won’t give you the answer.

Instead: Be specific! Explain what you tried. Where you are stuck. Why you are stuck. And, most importantly, exactly what type of information you need from the TA that would help you without solving the problem for you.

Rule 2: Don’t say: “I don’t understand what this problem is asking.”

That is not helpful. Once again, most TAs will assume that you are fishing for an answer; e.g., you hope that in his or her haste to help you understand, the TA will accidentally give away the goods.

Instead: Provide a list of specific things you find ambiguous. For each, explain the differing interpretations that seem possible. Many questions are, in fact, ambiguous, and the TA will appreciate this specificity and be happy to help you clarify.

Rule 3: Don’t say: “I think the problem is unsolvable.”

It is. Okay, sometimes there is a mistake in the problem write-up. But this is rare. And, when this does occur, it’s usually minor and easily identified if you know what you are doing. Most likely you’re just stuck, and you’re frustrated that you’re stuck, and you’re trying to displace this frustration on the rest of the world.

Instead: Refer to the advice given for Rules 1 and 2. Try to identify exactly where you are stuck, and make sure you have listed any specific parts of the problem you consider ambiguous. Nine times out of ten, this exercise will miraculously make the problem become once again solvable.

Rule 4: Don’t say: “Can I swing by your office if I have any questions?”

Many students abuse this privilege. They use it as an excuse to bother the poor TA, all day, with the type of irritating questions proscribed in the previous 3 rules.

Instead: It’s okay to try to meet a TA outside of official office hours. This is especially true if office hours are held the day before a problem set is due (a tendency I really disagree with from a pedagogical point of view). The key, however, is to schedule a specific meeting with a specific purpose. Suggest a duration and a list of the specific topics you want to discuss. For example: “I’m getting stuck on the first question because I’m still shaky on how to formulate a quality inductive step, I’m hoping we can go over some examples so I can use it more confidently.”

Rule 5: Don’t say: “Can you tell me if I’m on the right track here?”

TAs know this is code for: “can you tell if my answer is right?” They are not going to tell you this. You’re being less subtle then you think.

Instead: Make sure you understand the problem. Ask questions where things are unclear. Check your work your group members. Then, just trust yourself. It’s just one problem among hundreds you’ll solve as a student.