Study Tip No. 1: Don't be as dumb as you look.
This week’s theme — “new beginnings” — brought a smile to my face. First, I prefer new beginnings to its ugly cousin, old beginnings, and so I’m glad to see whenever the former is celebrated and the latter is taken down a peg or two.
It’s also the start of the school season which, now that I’m no longer a student, is my very favorite new beginning of them all. No more weekday lines at Six Flags!
The start of the school year also offers another reason for cheer. I have a set of strongly-held political beliefs with which no one with half a brain and a basic education could possibly quarrel. So, each school year brings us another year closer to a fully informed electorate and eventual nationwide ideological homogeneity.
To speed along the process, I have compiled these true-to-life study tips and offer my own startlingly inaccurate commentary.
Because any student who carries out these simple acts is sure to do at least the bare minimum necessary to graduate, I like to call them the “Joshua Shore No Child Left Behind Acts.” (Since I did not have the benefit of the “Joshua Shore No Child Left Behind Acts,” I had to repeat the 11th grade three times, and the start of those three school years are good examples of “old beginnings” that I didn’t much care for.)
The British Psychological Study recently released its list of “Nine Evidence-Based Study Tips.” Four of those nine tips — what’s known in science as a “plurality,” or “peninsula” in the singular — consist of, and I swear I’m not making this up, (1) sleeping well; (2) napping; (3) forgiving yourself for procrastinating; and (4) believing in yourself.
Surprisingly, “petting a bunch of puppies while having your back scratched” didn’t make the cut.
Now that’s a study regimen that I could have gotten behind when I was a student. In high school, I had to wake up so early that my alarm clock was set to go off before I went to sleep; napping hadn’t been invented yet; and procrastination is apparently not a problem when your day is so jam-packed with activities that the only time to do homework was in the car on the way to 6:00 a.m. sprints with the track team before morning classes started.
That homework routine only became a serious problem after I got my license and started driving myself to school. Believing in myself — and anti-lock brakes — is the only thing that got me from my driveway to the school parking lot most mornings.
To this list, the New York Times adds its advice to “Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits.” Apparently, sitting and concentrating is no longer good for learning, and instead it’s better to “alternat[e] the room where a person studies” to “improve[ ] retention.”
Or better yet, simply do your studying while driving to school as I did, and that way you will have the benefit of a constantly-changing environment. Just make sure you have anti-lock brakes.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
I think the folks involved in the British Psychological Study were reading my thesis. They might have also been observing the process I used to write it. This is great. This is great because I’m thinking this means that we won’t have to wait for the start of each new school year to take a step closer to nationwide ideological homogeneity. Just nap our way to it.