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How to Prevent Homework From Screwing Up Real Life


Class Life: What to Do About Class
Besides Taking Notes

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There are plenty of things to do in connection with class besides (or in addition to) taking notes. Some of them contribute to your education.

Here are a few tips derived from a success guide for transfer students developed by the Council of Deans (I think). (I am not sure whether I am revealing any secrets by making these tips available to freshmen. After all, upperclassmen are supposed to have some secrets!)

A little reflection (perhaps lightly spiced with hope) should suggest that if you actually follow this list, the resultant increase in academic efficiency will result in your actually saving time as well as learning more and enjoying college better. (Just a thought.)

Students who spend their time worrying about grades instead of education end up with both less education and poorer grades (or anyway I think they do).

  1. Read the whole (!!!) syllabus the day it is handed out. Circle or highlight any due dates or exam dates on it. These dates should be transferred to your calendar or date book.
  2. Keep a written calendar. College students are too busy to keep all their appointments in their heads. You may get away with this for a while, but sooner or later you will realize the wisdom of the Chinese proverb: "A good memory is not as good as a rotten writing brush." (好记性不如烂笔头。)
  3. If the syllabus is also available on the web, make sure to note which version is considered by the professor to take precedence. (If the TA scanned the syllabus and put it up without the instructor knowing how to use the web, chances are that the paper version is official and the web version is there only so the professor can claim to be "cutting edge" while remaining behind the times. If the professor put the syllabus on the web directly, chances are that there will be changes over the term and that the web version will be considered definitive.)
  4. Attend all classes (and all TA sections). For one thing, you are responsible for what happens there. For another, this is what you are paying your money for.
  5. Don't expect entertainment, and don't evaluate a class based on whether it is funny. University is not improv, and the professor has no obligation to be entertaining, only informative, so it is up to you to keep interested on your own. "You yourself must set flame to the faggots which you have brought," as playwright Kenneth Sawyer Goodman wisely advised his audiences.
  6. Prepare in advance. That means (1) reading stuff by the time the syllabus says it is to be read. You will understand class sessions much better that way. But it also means (2) thinking about the issues that the material raises, and deciding whether it leaves important questions unanswered. Reading is not enough; thinking about what you have read is what makes the difference.
  7. Begin studying from the first day of the term. This is particularly important advice if you were near the top of your class in high school. Remember that in college everybody was near the top of the class in high school. The amount (and quality) of study you did in high school is likely to be a minimum to pass, not the norm needed to master the material, get a basis you can build on in later courses (or later life), or to get a decent grade!
  8. Sit as close to the front as possible. In a class of 400 with a front row that accommodates 20, you can be in a class of 20 if you sit in the front row. This keeps you awake, makes you more recognizable to the instructor, allows you to see and hear everything clearly, and gives instant access at the end of class if you want to ask any quick one-on-one questions. Furthermore, most professors suspect that people who sit in the back do so because they have not done the reading, don't understand much, or (in exams) are planning to cheat and vainly hope to avoid being noticed. In contrast, most professors believe that people in the front row are brilliant go-getters who should always get the benefit of the doubt. (This revelation could transform your academic life. Don't say nobody ever told you.)
  9. Feel free to ask (intelligent) questions in class. There really are some questions that are irrelevant, but more often if something seems puzzling to you, it puzzles others as well. Most instructors like questions in class and will answer enthusiastically as well as considering you "promising" as a student.
  10. Visit office hours. They exist so that you can drop in and ask questions, offer ideas, or just say hello.
    Pet peeve: Various well-meaning but ignorant tipsters will advise you that the goal of visiting office hours is to brownie the professor so that you can someday get a better letter of recommendation than you deserve because the professorate succumbs easily to the flattery of anybody paying attention to them. That is a charming idea, but quite wrong. Professors do succumb pretty easily to flattery, but they didn't fall off the melon truck all that recently, and they have a strong sense of the importance of truth. A letter of recommendation is based on how a professor evaluates your suitability for whatever you are applying for, not on whether you visit office hours. Grmpf.
  11. If you are a commuter student, you will make your life happier if you spend as much time on campus as possible, attending anything you can. (Start with activities linked to your courses and activities that have refreshments.) Be sure always to carry your student ID so you are ready if it will get you a discount or access to something.
  12. Make it your goal to complete written assignments ahead of time. If you can do this, you will be able to reread them at the very end and make a few last-minute adjustments. You will also get more sleep.
  13. Figure out as early as possible how to find stuff in the library (including the "arcane" commands involved with using the university's own online catalog rather than depending on Google). The ability to locate information efficiently, and not just on the world wide web, is the key to success in an institution where knowledge and thought are the highest virtues.
    (Valuable hint #1: Universities spent an ungodly amount of money to subscribe to all sorts of proprietary internet stuff you never knew about before. Your university librarians know how to get at it, and are more than happy —actually it's sometimes kind of scary how happy they are— to show you how to get at it. The earlier you learn to use this stuff and the more you use it, the closer you will get to world domination. Go for it.)
    (Valuable hint #2: Given the rapidity with which electronic information technology is changing and the tendency of many professors not to keep up with it, it is not too hard to figure out how to run circles around them in your ability to find sources. Go for that too. Your professor will be shocked and awed. Besides, why should YOU be the dinosaur?)
  14. Explain class material to somebody … anybody. Your little sister, your foolish roommate, your imaginary cell-phone playmate, the sun chicken statue, the soap in the shower, ANYBODY. There is nothing like trying to explain something to fix it in your mind, at least till the end of the term. That is why group study is helpful. And why tutoring is helpful (especially if you can tutor somebody who's a bit thick.) And it is why the teacher appears to know more than is probably really the case. The reason why explaining helps appears to be that it requires enough mastery of the subject to organize the material and answer questions about it, which is more than listening to it or reading about it requires. If you can't explain something, you don't really understand it. (Read that about twenty times. Or click here.) So try explaining it! It really helps in identifying what already makes sense to you and what still doesn't.
    (Passing thought: That gives you something to ask about in office hours, allowing you to appear both brilliant and assiduous.)
  15. Define terms. Dictionaries are not handed down by God. They are written by regular old people, people like you. If you understand a term, you ought to be able to write your own dictionary entry, possibly a better one than what you find in your nerdy roommate's graduation-present dictionary or the 1903 public-domain one you find on the Internet. If you don't understand it, and if it is a term that matters, then you ought review it until you can define it as well as a dictionary can. By the way, lots of college exams have lots of questions that consist of writing definitions. (Ahem.)

    (Shameless Product Endorsement: Most on-line dictionaries are reprints of very old ones that have passed into the public domain with the passage of decades and that are now provided free mostly so they can host pop-up ads for other stuff. If you want a real dictionary, save your pennies and buy The American Heritage Dictionary (available as a pricey but slick smart phone app if you don't want to deal with the large book), or at least go through the reference page of your university library web site to something current and responsible.)
  16. Try to cultivate curiosity. Curiosity is the basis of most human knowledge acquisition. It is curiosity that inspires scientists and social scientists, and that forms the basis for the creativity underlying both the sciences and the arts. People who claim to be bored are basically boring people. If something doesn't leave you with unanswered questions, you're probably not paying attention.
  17. Don't even think about cheating. If we catch you, we do our best to make it ruin your life. (For details, click here.)
  18. Don't be obsessive about grades.


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