brians thoughts

So, here we are again. Instead of doing my homework, I’m doing something else. But who cares? It’s been a while since I’ve released something!

Anyway, here’s another post about education - this time it’s about the quirks I have about education in general. I may or may not have talked about this in a previous post but I want to elaborate on it anyway. We go into a class for 15 weeks, learn something based on something a teachers teaches us through word of mouth or slides or notes, etc. We write those things down so we don’t forget it. Combined with our awesome study techniques, the textbook, and our notes (well written or not), we should feel like we learned something.

Our teachers make sure of this through tests. The best type of tests ask questions that don’t rely on memorization but probe the students mind to assess their reasoning of a subject matter.

All of this is all fine and dandy but here’s two problems: 1) I don’t believe testing always accurately represents a students understanding of something - some people are just bad test takers or communicators and 2) the pace at which we learn anything, whatever level of education is at a fervor - there is no time to reflect on your material! In high school, you may be assigned a homework assignment that tests your material on a section of the textbook and then the very following night, you’ll have a new homework assignment that tests you on something else. The only other time you may get to see this material is on the test. It is up to the student to find and make time to review their material.  Now, I’m not against personal responsibility but when you have five classes, covering chapters that can go on for 60 pages long and you have to study and understand things in depth for each one - it’s a nearly impossible task to ask of anyone - things in there are bound to just be memorized and the understanding of others things is most likely going to be mediocre at best.

In college, we have general eds, which some people may view as unnecessary (I might talk about that in another post) so people place more emphasis on the classes they care about and develop in depth knowledge of that material while for, lets say, history or math class, it’s more of ‘just remember the formula, do a little practice, you’ll be golden’. So, does the problem really lie within people who aren’t trying hard enough or is there something seriously wrong with how we test and evaluate our students and the expectations that are put on them?

Personally, I’d rather spend 3-4 weeks on the same chapter or subject material and come into class every day and have a discussion on it rather than to move on to something else every class because I could really go into depth with my reasoning on the material as opposed to what I may have picked up in that 1 hour and 30 minutes.  Maybe that’s a little extreme, but you get the picture. We need to learn by reflection. Too little time in between tests and material does not allow for proper reflection regardless of how much time a student may put forth into studying for it.

It’s like colleges are trying to make money as fast as possible and the way to do that is to cram as much information into you as they can so they can reap another student’s money. The downside to this whole thing is if we were to spend seven or eight years in school learning material in depth; and lets say a bachelors did take that long to acquire, than nobody would be able to afford school. This leads into another huge discussion I’d like to have in the future about whether education should be free or not and how things would be different if it was free.

Anyway, what are your thoughts on this? Do you think we should have alternatives to tests in schools to assess students? Do you think we should spend more time on material than we currently do?

A to-do list! A bane of existence to some, and a life saver to others. Some people see a to-do list as a way to never get anything done while others can use it to be really productive. Today, I’m going to detail this to-do list software that I found really useful and I hope it will try to get some of you guys towards the middle ground. Maybe you’ll even grow to like making these lists! (Fat chance)

As I was looking at the long pile of homework we had planned for the next two weeks in Biology, I had a sudden urge to just pull out a Notepad and go to town. My professor had handed us a sheet detailing the assignments that were due next week and since some of them were online they would be listed, but ultimately, as life’s responsibilities start piling up or you start getting caught up in other activities, you’ll end up getting a 0 in there for a forgotten assignment. I, like many of you, don’t ever want that to happen. Getting a 0, not for laziness but for forgetfulness is unforgivable. Thus, I decided to go hunting on Google for a good to-do list software. Low, and behold, I clicked on the first link and I was hooked.

The software is called Swift To-Do and it really lives up to it’s name. It’s so quick to add tasks and get stuff done and everything is intuitive. No one wants to spend 10 minutes trying to remember where a menu is so a lot of your common functions are laid out in nice big buttons. That’s always a nice feature. That big green button highlighted there allows me to add a new task.

From there, that’s when things begin to shine. You can start adding new columns to organize your tasks. You can add deadline, priority, status, context(add a little note), time estimate, whatever. You can add as many columns for your particular task as you want as is relevant. For homework, I add done completion which adds a little percent thing until completion. I always group my assignments so I know what I’m looking at and I group them by color. My tests are black, homework assignments are pink, and quizzes are green. That way, even if I don’t see the group of the assignment right away, I know what it is right off the bat. And, as always, I add a priority to all of my tasks.

Another feature that I really like is rich text formatting notepad you get on the bottom of all of your tasks. You may end up coming back to the tasks a week from now or they might need context, whatever the reason it’s really simple to add a note to it. You simply type your text after you added your task. You can also add the note right at the time of the task creation like so:

As you can see, you can also attach specific documents to that task. That’s really handy if you’ve been working on a paper for one of your homework tasks, you can access it right there.

Another great option, that I found is the ability to hide tasks until a specific time. If you’re like me and you find yourself just adding stuff way in advance or a huge list of tasks intimidates you, you need a way to organize these things. At task creation, you have the choice to hide that task until a specific time. Even better, if you despise looking at calendars to figure out when you should hide an assignment or make it due, the program has plain English words like “Tomorrow” or “In a Week” so you can schedule your tasks without the need for the calendar.

Obviously, a good to-do list allows for reminders and you can set a good amount of them. You can select options like before the due date or on the due date to remind you or at a specific time. You can also email reminders to yourself. If the program is off and you miss the reminder, no worries, if you play with the settings in the options, you can get the program to remind you of stuff on start-up.

What if you want to share your to-do list with the world? You can choose a variety of options of what to export and it will export it as a HTML document. You can do this from File -> Print/Export

And the HTML file looks like this:

How about if you need the full fledged version and you don’t have the program on a computer? No problem. You can run the program with all your tasks included on a flash drive. File -> Deploy to USB Flash Drive -> Select location and you’re good to go. (Here, I’m using the Trial version so this is the message you’ll get but you get the picture)

You can always back up your tasks or files and everything is automatically saved so you don’t have to worry about having to press anything for your notes!

You can also include stuff like memos which I usually use to include little pieces of information about my class like the office hours of the professor and their contact information, like so:

Finally, the last bit of stuff I’m going to say about this thing is you get the ability to archive your tasks which is very useful when you want to look back at old homework, read the notes about an old completed project or get the email address of that professor you need a recommendation letter from.

It looks just like a recycle bin where you can recover your old tasks and still get a glimpse of them in mini window.

Alright, I get by now I must sound like a used car salesman pitching you this program, but honestly I think it is a real intuitive and easy to use program that can really aid you in your productivity and your ability to get your responsibilities in order. It’s big buttons, it’s ability to be run on any computer and it’s multitude of features are much more than I can go into depth here.

I highly suggest you check it out, you get a free 30 day trial without too many annoying messages and the cool thing is, very little features are locked in the trial version. In fact the only thing that I ran into that was locked was the USB version which is understandable since you don’t want your program running on something without a license anyway. The Standard Edition which is the one I’m running costs $44 bucks but that’s not a bad price for something that can do so much. I do tend to pirate my software, so that’s your call. Either way, I hope this post has really helped you guys out and hopefully will go a way towards getting your homework or work lives sorted out!

I’ve recently been reading some articles on how to study better and how to become an effective student. Some of the tips they provided were kind of common sense but others were really interesting and stuff I never thought about doing.

As a result, I thought I’d include some of the tips I read about. As for their effectiveness or usefulness, that’s up to your interpretation. I myself have not tried some of these things, so I can’t speak for their effectiveness, however I think given practice they would serve as pretty important pieces of advice.

1. Flipping back on pages of a book indicates one of two things:

• You don’t remember the material.
• You don’t know how to do the problem or understand the material.

I’ve noticed I’ve done this one a lot. I’d be working on an Accounting or math problem and I’d realize I’d have to go back to an example or I’d have to look at my notes as I’d be doing the problem. This is bad and you shouldn’t do it. If you really know your stuff, you should be able to do your homework or material without the aid of the text.

Looking at if from a different perspective, let’s say you’re presented with a problem that you need to solve at your job. With no internet to look up an answer and just you and your desk, you’ll be presented with a dilemma if you can’t figure out what type of problem it is and how to solve it.

1. Form study groups and teach the material

Study groups can be very effective in helping the students who are weaker in a subject get stronger in that subject and gives the opportunity for the students who are stronger in the subject to reinforce what they already know. I have found this one personally has helped me a lot. Someone elses opinion on what you say can really affect how you say it. So, if you are describing a process or an idea to someone, they may or may not understand you. Being able to not only explain a process but explain it in multiple different ways really just shows off how well you know the subject. As long as the study group stays on topic, it can be a reliable way to help teach and motivate the members in your group.

1. Review your material always.

Think about it, you pop $1,000 dollars of someone’s money on a course. You spend 15 weeks learning something that you might have a great grasp on by the time you leave that course. However, if you don’t review the material and keep on it, you’re going to forget it so fast it’s not even funny.

I’ve myself heard that math has a 12 hour shelf life in your brain. By 24 hours, you’ll have forgotten 75% of what you learned that day. What will that percentage be after a year? I am personally going to be using this Flash Card type of program called SuperMemo that tests me on material I put into it. It then reminds me of it based on whether I know the material very well or not. Therefore, the material I know well is repeated to me less often and vice versa for material that I don’t know very well. I heard you get 95% retention rates with this thing. I definitely recommend it to anyone!

Also, memorizing information is a good thing but don’t learn for memorization. You don’t want to just memorize a specific problem set or ideas. You want to understand why you got that idea, how that problem was solved or why a specific set of grammar rules can be applied. My plan to tackle this? Do practice problems for a assignment, scan those practice problems into my computer so I can remember how to do some of them, and throw half of them away. If I really know my stuff, I don’t need to be reminded of that specific problem, I can do it at any given time (which is what a job is going to need you to do anyway).

1. Review as you go

I’m personally going to be using this one a lot due to Biology and Economics. These two courses require a lot of memorization and understanding of processes. As you go on to do Chapter 2’s Homework or right after you’ve completed it, go back to Chapter 1 and review it. The same thing applies to Chapter 3, once you’ve read it and understand it, go back to Chapters 1 and 2. In this way, you’re always going back to the old material. When it’s test time, you have less to memorize or study because it will be solid in your memory. By the time you take that test, you might have seen that material at least 8 or 9 times.

1. Know your “hows” and “whys”

This is a much more effective of way of doing something rather than trying to memorize a bunch of information for a test. Effective exams test you on how or why something happened, not just specific facts about the information. Anyone can memorize facts but to truly analyze and understand a situation is something completely different.

I always try to do that during Accounting and math because those are very quantitative and analytical fields. If you know why you have to do something and how to do it, then you can analyze any situation without having to rely on any one specific piece of information. Yea, it’s cool to know formulas or have little shortcuts, but understanding why they work and how they’re made into formulas is much more beneficial. For example, I could simply memorize the Liquidity Index for a company and tell them they can turn their assets into cash in 30 days. But, analyzing every part of that formula makes me understand why it’s useful, why we involve certain assets over others, and a bunch of other stuff.

So, finally to conclude this long post, this may not be earth-shattering stuff or even anything you didn’t already know, but I honestly felt that when I read these tips, that I wasn’t doing a lot of these things and that made for poor understanding of a subject. After reading this, I hope to do these steps every time I have to study for something.

As always, I hope this post was useful to somebody and that these tips can be of use to you. I’d also like to know your thoughts on this. Do you guys have tips on how to study better? Do you do something that really works for you? Do any of you use specific software to help you study?

So, tomorrow is the start of my Spring Semester under a new major. This will pretty much be my deciding factor for which course I like so I can decide on a major to concentrate in by next Spring.

Other than that, I tried signing up for this same math class twice. It was canceled at two different campus locations. They finally had an online version which I was scared to take because I had never taken an online class before. From what I had heard, though, there would at least be notes and a discussion area. Nope! I got to find out a few days ago that it’s a self taught class, so obviously I’m really nervous about it!

The class is a Business Calculus class, so it doesn’t extensively cover Trigonometry or anything like that but it does cover finding Derivatives and Integrals. My first homework assignment is on Limits, so hopefully this will go well. I think there are enough online resources out there that it shouldn’t be too bad and I would still get to email the teacher and get access to their office hours.

Have any of you ever taken an online or self paced/self taught course? What kind of resources did you use? Any tips?