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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Don’t spend too much time on tiny quizzes.
if you treat every quiz like a midterm, you’re going to overload your schedule.
if you skip class, “it’ll take twice as long studying to make up for what you missed.”
it saves you time.
take notes that clearly identify and explain all of the big ideas that are presented so that you can review them later without spending any extra time.
All of the information you write down during class should be associated with a well-labeled question.
Don’t be afraid to jot down “QUESTION:” and then leave the rest of the line blank as you begin recording evidence.
When you formulate a conclusion, you are cementing a big idea.
“It’s important to read over your notes right after class to absorb them and make corrections
The formatting is just what might come naturally to the student during the heat of the moment,
the strategies here are actually much simpler.
record as many sample problems as possible.
your entire focus in a technical class should be to write down, as faithfully as possible, the steady stream of examples provided by your professor.
Very few students actually do the technical reading ahead of time.
you can go back and use the reading to help fill in the blanks.
Smart students follow the professor’s examples with their textbook open.
Professors move too quickly for you to record all of their examples, so you must learn to prioritize your note-taking.
Even in the fastest class, there should be time to jot down the questions and final solutions.
closely follow the problems being presented and then insist on asking questions when they don’t understand a specific step.
If you can’t ask a question, then at least clearly mark where you got confused.
pay particular attention at the beginning of the discussion, and don’t get discouraged if subsequent problems fly by
what they accomplish
why they’re important.
It’s impossible to read every single thing assigned to you in every class.
Always read the assignments from favored sources.
readings from Inventing America (a textbook) show up for almost every lecture in this syllabus, so this is clearly a favored source.
how you take notes on the reading makes a big difference.
The best compromise is to use a strategy similar to the one outlined earlier for taking lecture notes.
all big ideas can be reduced to a question, evidence, and conclusion.
Look for the question being answered by the author.
look for the author’s conclusion
Skim the entire reading.
use a pencil to make checkmarks next to important paragraphs
“Just get the gist of the author’s message
You don’t need to capture everything.
mark a few solid examples that justify the conclusion
go back and find your check marks. For each mark, record in your notes a concise summary of the corresponding point.
When you’re done, your notes should contain a clearly labeled question followed by a half-dozen or so bullet-pointed pieces of evidence, then a clearly labeled conclusion.
“read for arguments, not facts.”
“You can work on problem sets in small pieces while you’re between classes or activities.”
if you spread out your work, you will end up spending fewer hours on the assignment than if you tried to do it all at once.
working in groups “can drastically cut the time required to finish a really hard problem set.”
Always go to office hours, if you have time, and arrive knowing which homework problems pose the biggest challenge to you.
solve problems on the go.
set aside a little block of time to familiarize yourself with a couple of problems,
try to solve the problem in the most obvious way possible.
you will have at least identified what makes this problem
hard.
Instead of trying to force a solution, think about the problem in between other activities.
go slowly and deliberately the first time.
