Let’s not kid ourselves. Sometimes what that prof is up there lecturing on goes in one ear and right out the other. This is frustrating, time-wasting, and generally puts us to sleep. Annie Murphy Paul recently discussed how people can increase the amount of information they may glean from observing and listening in a lecture by being intentional. Follow the link below to see the full article and read more about how the power of intention will help you learn!
Remember how satisfying it was to connect the dots in the right order? Step by step the edges and details became clearer until eventually you were left with a kick-ass picture of a giraffe—or something else equally as awesome. Well, what if I told you that your education is meant to be sort of like that, minus the whole pre-determined numerical order.
Learning is about connecting the concepts and ideas you learn in a class to the network of concepts and ideas that you already have. This makes it easier for you to learn the material. It also allows you to bring unique perspectives and connections to a discipline that other students might not be able to.
Karen Eifler, a professor at the University of Portland, describes using the opening credits of The Brady Bunch to demonstrate this concept to students. The metaphor she draws is that each side of the family—the knowledge a student already has within or between disciplines and what they will learn in the class—was previously unconnected, but after being brought together, each family member (i.e. concept) is able to be connected to every other one.
She urges students to find the connections between even the most seemingly distant of concepts. In doing so, a students’ knowledge is not scattered and only selected when asked to recall, but rather is integrated and used in conjunction with each other to think in innovative and critical ways. The benefits of the integrated framework massively outweigh a scattered one.
I can personally attest to this. The only reason I wrote a senior thesis was because I started to make connections between classes I had taken, especially between disciplines. I found that theories like the Fundamental Attribution Error, which I learned about in social psychology classes, wove perfectly together with examining the cultural and colorblind racism that were explored in my comparative studies in race and ethnicity classes. I even was able to see that the Network Effect I learned about in a CS class I took could be connected with CSRE & Sociology through thinking about the interactions that corporations have with consumers in the media and how these may contribute to the monopolization of a market.
Those are the moments and insights that lead to new learning. Those connections allow us to push the boundaries of what we know, or thought we knew, into new frontiers. Intersectionality allows us to orient ourselves in different positions and use different lenses to look at, and across, disciplines. It allows us to take previously isolated communities of scholars and ideologies and place them in conversation with each other, connecting the dots to create a more coherent and beautiful image than the one we have now.
So let’s pick up the pen and draw those connections. Marcia, meet Greg.
I was going to write about the advantages of living the slow life, but by popular demand I am taking a crack at test anxiety. Apparently students have a few exams this time of the quarter…
Though our capacity to learn is immense, theoretically infinite, there are in fact limits to the cognitive load we can bear at any given moment. “Limits in capacity” is not an idea that many Stanford Ducks are fond of. This is, after all, the place where anything can and will eventually be invented, where new possibilities are born and take shape daily. Limits, shmimits.
But we are grappling with the exact same 24 hour day as the next guy, and we are limited by physical limitations that make us frail and finite.
We have about 100 billion brain cells, give or take. When most of these are occupied by the inner dialogue of test anxiety, there are only about 6 or 7 left on test day for (1) signing your name, (2) not vomiting, (3) remembering how to tell time, and (4) knowing which is the business end of a mechanical pencil. When in an anxious state, our cognitive and physical resources are marshaled in the most urgently determined direction: survive the horror.
There are several strategies that can be helpful in turning our cognitive and physical resources to the delicate problem-solving at hand. They’re not easy, but they are simple:
Remember when you were 7, and your teacher said “Your assignment is to read Charlotte’s Web”? You read every word because that’s what good students do.
And remember when you were 13 and your teacher said “Read Chapters 4-7 in your History text”? You read every word because that’s what good students do.
And remember when you were in high school and your teacher said “Read Chapter 26 from your chemistry text”? You (hopefully) read every word because that’s what good students do.
Some day, someone’s going to tell you about the most amazing book and you’ll read the first page, decide it’s trash, and never pick it up again. Of all the books you want to read, all the things you want to do with your time, you’ll decide this one’s just not worth it. You will have criteria for this decision (whether you consciously articulate it or not) and you will have within you enough authority to declare it worthy or not of your time and attention. That, my friends, is what grown-up good students get to do.
At some point between today and Some Day, that voice will start to know a thing or two and will need to come out from under the covers and start asserting itself. You will start developing your voice that-knows-a-thing-or-two and will make independent decisions about what to read closely and carefully and what to skim over. But first, you need to develop your criteria.
If the thought of not reading every single word sends your heart into palpitations and sweat begins pouring from your armpits, this is for you.
Scientific Articles
Textbooks
Books
At a certain point, everyone must develop their own personal style for taking in and processing the loads of information thrown at them every day. For a lot of us, college is the time for this specific maturation, as a 4-year introduction in to what it means to be responsible for yourself, and to live semi-independently, etc. There’s no one-size-fits-all for these kind of skills: your best bet is to take the advice we described above, try it out, and see what resonates with you, what doesn’t, and what you’d like to try out next.
Happy reading.