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Using the Tools

The present is the only thing of which a man can be deprived. – MARCUS AURELIUS, Meditations The most valuable result of all education is to make you do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not. – THOMAS HUXLEY

INTEREST MEASUREMENT TEST

1 Have you ever followed a daily schedule for work and play which you, yourself, made?

2 Do you frequently turn in assignments late?

3 Do you consider yourself thoughtless and rude when you are late to appointments?

4 Do you, without looking, know the name of the author of any of your textbooks?

5 Do you believe that, other than your parents, the people who will most influence your life for good are your teachers?

The secret of how to study is locked up in the desire to learn. Good students are not “born students”; good students are made by constant and deliberate practice of good study habits, and for this there is absolutely no substitute. The first of these habits is the proper use of time. Even though you feel that you cannot be the best student in your class, you will be surprised at the sudden improvement that will develop out of a sensible routine. Do not be frightened by the term “sensible routine”; it merely means order. Order presupposes that all-important quality which must come from within yourself—the desire to be a good student. This responsibility is yours. Your parents cannot wish it upon you, and your teachers cannot force it upon you. You must first want to be a good student.

“How can you take the greatest possible advantage of your capacities with the least possible strain?” asked Dr. William Osler of his beginning medical students. Then he would answer the question for them:

By cultivating system. I say cultivating advisedly, since some of you will find the acquisition of systematic habits very hard. There are minds congenitally [born] systematic; others have a lifelong fight against an inherited tendency to diffuseness and carelessness in work. Take away with you, from a man who has had to fight a hard battle, the profound conviction of the value of system in your work. To follow the routine of the classes is easy enough, but to take routine into every part of your daily life is hard work. Let each hour of the day have its allotted duty, and cultivate that power of concentration which grows with its exercise, so that the attention neither flags nor wavers, but settles with a bull-dog tenacity on the subject before you. Constant repetition makes a good habit fit easily in your mind, and by the end of the session you may have gained that most precious of all knowledge—the power to work.¹

In order to form good study habits you must know what you are going to study and when you are going to study. Both of these important aids to study can be accomplished by a very simple device, a satisfactory plan book. One that might be recommended is the Student Daily Planner.* It is a compact little book, arranged so that your whole week’s work schedule and assignments are spread out before you.

The diagram does not give a complete picture. The space for each period is large enough so that you can also write in detailed assignments.

A carefully worked out study schedule is essential to good study habits. In the study schedule shown, the student starts the week with all work prepared. He or she will be far ahead during the entire week with a period designated for the study of each subject. An orderly program saves time so that there will be time to enjoy some of the things that might otherwise be missed. If you know that you are going to study Latin the third period, or from 7:30 to 8:30 P.M., the time that might be wasted looking at one book and then another, moving from one chair to another, shifting from dream to reality, will be saved. Without an efficient schedule more time is spent getting ready to study than is spent at actual study.

Many people wonder constantly where their time goes, but few ever bother to analyze a day and find out. In order to convince yourself that a study schedule, carefully followed, would save you much time and give you many study advantages, you should keep a time chart of your waking hours for a week or two. Only by being honest and doing a sincere job of self-discovery and evaluation can you improve. Your time chart can be drawn very simply after the following model.

The schedule should be made out before the week starts. It should be followed daily, weekly, monthly, until it becomes a natural part of your program. It cannot be done the first week and then forgotten—not if you expect any help from it. It will only be helpful in direct proportion to the thought and effort you put into it.

Do not expect a week’s trial to establish the habit. You will want to change your schedule from time to time as emphasis on one subject or another demands more or less time. One thing is certain; a schedule will never become a real study aid unless you make it so. It can be a great aid; as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Nothing great was ever accomplished without enthusiasm.” Therefore, be enthusiastic enough to work out two or three study models. Here a second model is offered. It is slightly different from the preceding one. You can probably make one much more efficient for your own needs.

Avoid being too heroic in establishing your study schedule. Your capacities vary. You will need more time for one subject than for another; this you must determine as quickly as possible and adjust accordingly. Your schedule should be rigid enough to be effective, yet flexible enough to take care of ever recurring emergencies. A well-organized schedule will not only bring order to the time element of your existence but will affect an orderly approach to all elements of your life.

Research by psychologists and efficiency experts has resulted in impressive statistics that relate the advantages of well-organized time and time-product factors. “If we have,” writes Dr. B. C. Ewer, “several duties confronting us, simultaneously, it is only too likely that we shall fail to do any of them. They seem to get in each other’s way. The pressure of each prevents us from giving ourselves whole-heartedly to any, or we turn in futile fashion from one to another, dropping each as soon as it is begun.”²

Does Dr. Ewer’s comment not recall the way you have dealt with three or four assignments?

The people whom you encounter in reading biographies, the people who have made the world better, the people who have achieved success, are the people who have learned to make time serve them. Invariably their work habits show a well-designed pattern or schedule. In reality such a schedule becomes one of your great responsibilities in life. The person who fails in this responsibility becomes a hanger-on, a liability; and most tragic of all, they sometimes becomes an unbearable burden to themselves.

HOW TO USE THE BOOKS

You have already noted in Chapter Two that books are the memory of mankind. Books constitute your second most important tool in education. In school your chief concern is with textbooks. What is a textbook? A textbook presents the principles of a subject; it is the basis of instruction. It is the foundation upon which you build; it is the springboard from which you dive into the world of thought and learning. The function of the textbook is to provide a “beginning.”

You are reluctant to enter upon a venture unless you have first surveyed it. So it should be with each assignment in your textbook. You should first survey the book. See what you are going to study; even a brief survey of the table of contents is better than nothing. As you begin an assignment make a preliminary survey of the assignment. The preliminary survey will vary in different courses and different books and can be modified to your own peculiar needs. These variants will be taken up in the chapters dealing with specific subjects, but the general form for the reading assignment makes a good beginning.

Variations will become evident as you begin to organize your work, but the preliminary survey will consist mainly of the following:

(1) Study the chapter title; relate the topic to what you have studied before. (2) Study the section headings if the book is so constructed; this gives you the broad divisions of the topic. (3) Study the paragraph headings; this puts you on speaking terms with the subject matter of the chapter or assignment. Having made the preliminary survey you know what you are going to learn from the assignment, and you already know, in five minutes, more than the person who has started with the first sentence and waded laboriously through the whole assignment, with no achievement other than being able to say to the teacher, “Yes, I read every word.” The few minutes spent on the preliminary survey will save you much time because it will afford you a background for understanding what you are reading and why you are reading it. Neglect this preliminary survey and you become lost in details, unable to see how they are related to each other, unable to establish a relationship between what you have studied and what you are studying.

The textbook is arranged as a guide to help you from one important point of interest to the next. It is actually a series of mental stepping stones leading to one of two heights—information and knowledge. The rules, the definitions, the notes all have bearing upon the next step. Ignore them and you cannot hope to write the exercise, solve the problem, or convert the information into knowledge. The student who ignores rules and definitions is all too soon overcome by ideas that cannot be understood. Without mastery of the fundamentals, you work toward disaster.

The student who accomplishes the difficult task of effective study is not satisfied with a preliminary survey, followed by a thorough study of the assignment. The real student goes one step farther, making a final survey to be sure of what has been studied. The one outstandingly inefficient method of study used by the failing student is to read an assignment over and over, ad infinitum then close the book without the slightest idea of what has been absorbed and not absorbed about the assignment. Unless you check by asking yourself what you have studied, you can neither locate nor remedy your weak points. Reciting to yourself is one of the best ways of clinching the essential information of an assignment, and it is the first step in converting information into knowledge.

Since your book is a tool and your own possession, use it as such. Read footnotes and information under illustrations. Make use of questions, study helps, and review exercises at the end of the chapter if the book provides such. Learn the time-saving purpose of the index. The textbook is a tool only if used wisely; it is a burden and obstacle if approached blindly and without interest.

Probably the greatest single source of information available to the majority of students is the textbook. The most practiced classroom activity is some type of elaboration of textbook material. It is the common ground where student and teacher meet. It is doubtless true that more student hours are spent in studying textbooks than in any other form of study. While the nature of textbooks in different subjects varies greatly, the fundamental practices for successful study are basically the same for all books.

The following suggestions have proved successful in giving students more respect for the material they are required to study, and more self-confidence in their approach and mastery of the material in the textbook. Try them on your own assignments.