A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra)

by Barbara Oakley

Articulating your question is 80 percent of the battle. By the time you’ve figured out what’s confusing, you’re likely to have answered the question yourself!”

writing by hand helps get the ideas into mind more easily than if you type the answer.

The biggest lie ever is that practice makes perfect. Not true—practice makes you better.

“They say experience is the best teacher. Instead, it should be that failure is the best teacher. I’ve found that the best learners are the ones who cope best with failure and use it as a learning tool.”

Testing in itself is a powerful learning experience. It changes and adds to what you know, also making dramatic improvements in your ability to retain the material.

Law of Serendipity: Lady Luck favors the one who tries.

book Calculus Made Easy,

models are just metaphors,

Writing appears to help you to more deeply encode (that is, convert into neural memory structures) what you are trying to learn.

It is the practice—particularly deliberate practice on the toughest aspects of the material—that can help lift average brains into the realm of those with more “natural” gifts.

Extremely smart people are more likely than people of normal intelligence to procrastinate

Now I know why!!!

“Deficiencies of innate ability may be compensated for through persistent hard work and concentration. One might say that work substitutes for talent, or better yet that it creates talent.”6 —Santiago Ramón y Cajal

we can make significant changes in our brain by changing how we think.

Students who interrupt their work constantly not only don’t learn as deeply, but also aren’t able to transfer what little they do learn as easily to other topics.

Multitasking during the learning process means you don’t learn as deeply—this can inhibit your ability to transfer what you are learning.

Persistence is often more important than intelligence.

(Handwriting builds stronger neural structures in memory than typing.)

theories tell you what something is; models tell you merely what something is like”

http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/