Many students don’t even know what studying is. They take their homework home, try their best, and think they are done.
Let’s get this straight right now: homework is NOT studying.
Homework is practice to help you cement ideas and show where you need to put in more effort. It is like a pretest to give you a heads-up on where you need to study. It is not studying on its own.
It can take upwards of 30 interactions with a new concept before we can truly understand it. Your teacher will provide you with one or two interactions with the material, if you include homework. Studying makes up the difference.
You, as the student, are responsible for reviewing the material:
- before the teacher introduces it
- while you are working on the material in class
- by doing homework
- after the class has moved on to new topics until you truly understand it
That is what it takes to move a concept from short-term memory into long-term memory.
The only way to avoid cramming is to make sure most of what you learn progresses into your long-term memory.
Why Should I Study?
Most of you are probably wondering why you should bother putting in all this work for something you will never use.
My grandfather used to say “you will use everything you take the time to truly learn.” I’m old enough now to know he was right. Everything I’ve truly learned and put into long-term memory gets used often—even things that seem like useless factoids.
School gives you much more than factoids. Learning math and science is learning how to problem solve. It is learning to ask questions, form opinions, test those opinions, seek new knowledge, and revise your opinion as you learn more. History confers on us the mistakes and lessons of the past so we can avoid the mistakes of our ancestors. Language arts help us communicate our ideas in ways that others can understand.
Think of it this way: a professional athlete doesn’t only play their sport to train. They lift weights, stretch, eat healthily, and practice other sports to cross train. If you intend to become a historian, learning math and science is that cross training. It opens the mind and allows you to ask questions you might not have otherwise thought about.
Art is important to engineers and scientists. How many drawings do you think an engineer makes? All information is interconnected and useful. High school was intended to give you a foundation for interdisciplinary thinking.
An example featuring the importance of this interdisciplinary thinking can be seen in what archaeologists originally recognized as man’s first attempt at a calendar: bones with 28 carved markings on it. Recently, the question arose why a man would need to keep track of 28 days? Could this be a woman’s first attempt at a calendar instead? Those kinds of questions don’t happen without a background in science and the scientific method.
Taking the time to really learn as much as you can will help you in the long run.
This is the first chapter in a book I’m writing about studying math and science. Follow me on Medium and Instagram for more. I will release one chapter a week. Preorder link for the book coming soon!