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November 17, 2018 - January 12, 2019
Focus on the process (the way you spend your time) instead of the product (what you want to accomplish).
sure to schedule free time to nurture your diffuse mode.
Multitasking means that you are not able to make full, rich connections in your thinking, because the part of your brain that helps make connections is constantly being pulled away before neural connections can be firmed up.
Focusing on taking small, manageable steps forward and time management are key.
Practice is where you are supposed to fail.
We should ALWAYS be perpetual learners. Always in ALL WAYS.
“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.”
New inventions almost never initially appear in their fully formed glory.
Did you remember to skim ahead and check the questions at the end of the chapter to help you start building chunks of understanding?
once you start working on a math or science problem, you’ll notice that each step you complete signals the next step to you.
Work a key problem all the way through on paper.
As you work through this problem, there should be no cheating, skipping steps, or saying, “Yeah, I’ve got it” before you’ve fully worked it out. Make sure each step makes sense.
Do another repetition of the problem, paying attention to the key processes.
Take a break.
Sleep.
Do another repetition.
Add a new problem.
Do “active” repetitions.
Generating (that is, recalling) the material helps you learn it much more effectively than simply rereading it.
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.
Chunking means integrating a concept into one smoothly connected neural thought pattern.
If you prepare well by practicing and building a good mental library, you will find that luck will be increasingly on your side.
But to be effective in learning math and science, you must master your habits.
Keep your eye on the goal, and try not to get too unsettled by occasional roadblocks.
People who make a habit of getting their work done in binges are much less productive overall than those who generally do their work in reasonable, limited stints.
Over the past decades, students who have blindly followed their passion, without rational analysis of whether their choice of career truly was wise, have been more unhappy with their job choices than those who coupled passion with rationality.
“The ability to think in spatial terms has been shown to be important for success in careers such as engineering, architecture, computer science, and many others.
create a metaphor or analogy for it—often,
Writing appears to help you to more deeply encode (that is, convert into neural memory structures) what you are trying to learn.
it’s wise to be careful about what you decide to skip when reviewing for tests. Your memory for related but nonreviewed material can become impaired.
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.
we can make significant changes in our brain by changing how we think.
Good chunks form neural patterns that resonate, not only within the subject we’re working in, but with other subjects and areas of our lives. The abstraction helps you transfer ideas from one area to another.
One of the most important things we can do when we are trying to learn math and science is to bring the abstract ideas to life in our minds.
simple explanations are possible for almost any concept, no matter how complex.
When you cultivate simple explanations by breaking down complicated material to its key elements, the result is that you have a deeper understanding of the material.
the Feynman technique, which asks people to find a simple metaphor or analogy to help them grasp the essence of an idea.
Equations are just ways of abstracting and simplifying concepts. This means that equations contain deeper meaning, similar to the depth of meaning found in poetry.
Transfer is the ability to take what you learn in one context and apply it to something else.
Multitasking during the learning process means you don’t learn as deeply—this
Persistence is often more important than intelligence.
Approaching material with a goal of learning it on your own gives you a unique path to mastery.
Neurosurgeon Ben Carson, winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his pioneering surgical innovations, was initially flunking and gently urged to leave medical school.
Research has shown that students learn best when they themselves are actively engaged in the subject instead of simply listening to someone else speak.
Inventor and author William Kamkwamba, born in 1987 in Africa, could not afford to attend school.
American neuroscientist and pharmacologist Candace Pert had an excellent education, earning a doctorate in pharmacology from Johns Hopkins University.
Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Mark Zuckerberg, James Cameron, Steve Jobs, and Steve Wozniak, dropped out of college.
We will continue to see fascinating innovations from people who are able to combine the best aspects of traditional and nontraditional learning with their own self-taught approaches.
Taking responsibility for your own learning is one of the most import...
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Student-centered learning, where students are challenged to learn from one another and are expected to be their own drivers toward mastery of the material, is extraordinarily powerful.
