1. SLEEP
Everybody needs sleep. Your body demands sleep in order for your brain to work effectively. You need at least five sleep cycles every night, preferably six, possibly more because your brains and bodies are still growing. Each sleep cycle has four stages, from light sleep into progressively deeper sleep, ending with 15 minutes of intense, deep, REM sleep (when you dream). Each cycle lasts 80-100 minutes, depending on the person. At the end of each cycle, your body is ready to wake up if it must. You can wake briefly (and not fully) and go back to sleep, for a short phone call or the snooze button, but if you get up for the morning before a cycle is over, it provides only limited benefit. However, if you interrupt a cycle during the final REM stage, its worse than not starting at all - your body is not ready to wake up, and your brain is not ready to start the day. You will feel like you've been hit by a bus. Make sure you get to bed in time to get a full night's sleep!
Teenagers are different from adults, in that teenagers naturally stay up later and wake up later. Teenage bodies and brains want to stay up until midnight and sleep until 9:00 am. Too bad, then, that we make you get up for the first bus at the crack of dawn. No wonder you're always tired.
Even worse, lack of sleep leaves you tired the next day, making it hard to focus, learn, listen, and recall.
In sleep, all the things that you learned in the day are transferred from your short term memory into your long term memory. Ideas and concepts are linked together and made easier to recall and understand. This process is the foundation of learning.
It follows that if you don't sleep, you don't learn. That's why a caffeine-fueled all-nighter never works as well as you think it should, and a good nights sleep is the best help.
If you don't sleep enough (or get poor quality sleep), your learning and studying are substantially less effective.
The more chances you give your brain to "sleep on it", the better you will learn the material. Studying a little bit each night, with repetition and review, is much better than trying to do it all at once.
2. Study YOUR way
Every person learns best in a different way. Some us are visual learners, some auditory, and some are readers. Some of us like the big picture, some like the details. Some of us like consistency, pattern, and similarities in our subjects, others are drawn to the exceptions and differences. Moreover, we all have different intellectual strengths and weaknesses and different experiences, so our ability to make connections between the things we know and the things we are trying to learn will be varied. The study skills that work for your friends may not work for you - you need to find the best methods or tricks to help knowledge stick to your brain.
These methods may seem silly - like memorizing chemical elements in a song, or giving names to each physics equation. They may seem like grade school relics - like flash cards or writing vocabulary words five times each.
But if they work, that's really all that counts. You want to study better, not just more.
How to study for THIS CLASS
1. Homework is suggested. I assign it because I think it will help you. If you disagree, you don't have to do it. Only those homework assignments you turn in will affect your grade. However, as explained in the syllabus, homework grades are the "easy points" in your grade that raise your class average. You will probably want them.
Homework Rubric (raw score):
Score Attempted Correct
5 All Most
4 All Some
3 Most Most
2 Some Some
1 Some None
0 None None
"Attempted" means one or more of the following:
Problems involving calculation: Givens, Unknowns, any Equation are identified, and an attempt to solve the equation (if possible) is made.Homework raw scores are added to your grade as follows: Raw Score + 10 = Adjusted Score.
Problems involving graphs: axes must be drawn and clearly labeled.
Other problems: written statements sufficient to conclude that the student has made a reasonable attempt to answer the question.
2. Quizzes are required. You re-take them until you pass 100%.
3. Tests are required. Students requiring accommodation should contact me. Students scoring less than 65% must retake, as explained in the Syllabus.
