I learned the most important lesson from school, 4 years ago …

4 years ago, I wasn’t very good at school.

Why?

Simply because no one had taught me how to learn.

Despite my 10 years spent at school, surrounded by teachers, no one had taken the trouble to explain to me how I should study, how I should listen, how I should learn.

Besides, no one has told me this until today, and I have the impression that no one will ever tell me.

Learning to learn well is an art, and it is above all experience that makes all the difference, but a few tips help a lot.

I intend to help you, but you will have to make an effort.

Today, I am talking about school.

Is the advice they give us really useful? Practical? Applicable to everyone?

I think not, even if there are exceptions.

So here is an example of a completely stupid practice in my opinion that is used by the majority of teachers: not handing in the answers!

Indeed, 4 years ago, I had my first class where I had all the answers in advance, and it was ALSO the year my grades started to skyrocket!

In previous classes, I had a list of exercises to do as homework.

I did them, and when the class came around the teacher would give us the answers orally, but I had so many mistakes that I couldn’t keep up, and most of the time I couldn’t remember what I was doing.

So I kept making the same mistakes.

4 years ago, in my math class where I had the answers written down, I could check if I had the right answer right after I had done it.

If I had the right answer, I could increase my confidence in my abilities.

If on the contrary I did not have the right answer, I tried to find the right approach WITHOUT LOOKING at the approach of the answer key, to do the process by myself.

Let me tell you that after having done the same problem 7 times, we remember the right approach.

Unfortunately, several students had not understood the usefulness of the answer keys, and tried to find the approach with the answer given by the teacher, or simply to memorize “by heart” the approach if it was provided.

If this is what you are doing, stop immediately.

As I said earlier, it is by looking at the answers AFTER that we learn.

By redoing the problem as many times as possible to then succeed almost effortlessly, so often have we done it.

If you say to yourself:

But you say that I am going to save time in my studies and you are asking me to take more time, that is not logical!

well think again.

Taking your time almost always saves you time.

I’m going to make a category on this subject to give you more details and so that you understand that you MUST take your time.

To give you a quick introduction, think about this:

If you take a math class, and the first few weeks you see the basics of algebra.

You have two options:

  1. You do the exercises as quickly as possible to please the teacher and in the end you succeed in the exercises more by luck than by understanding.

  2. You take your time to do your exercises, and you UNDERSTAND absolutely everything you do.

The first choice takes less time, and you have about the same grades.

However, later you see conics, which require a perfect knowledge of algebra to be understood.

Depending on what you chose to do at the beginning of the year, two things can happen

1: You did your exercises as quickly as possible, now you have forgotten some concepts and are struggling with the basics, when you should be concentrating on the new material. Then:

Either you continue to take less time and your grades go down.

Or you try to start over because you realize that you don’t understand and you take much more time

2: You took your time with algebra and now it is intuitive for you to do it. So you have no difficulty understanding conics, and with each new subject, the basics will be anchored in you and you will no longer have to think to use them. Think about it: would you have been able to read all of this text if reading had not become second nature to you?

No. It took you ages to learn to read better and faster, but it’s helping you immensely now, and saving you a ton of time.

P.S. Written in 2009