Learning to learn (better) You are probably not a good learner. Oh, please don’t get insulted by that phrase. It is what a university is: a place where you become a much more powerful learner. Some students do not realize that. They think it is all about atoms, molecules, integrals, bugs, forces, fertilizers and energies. Actually university is more about you and your ability to learn, about you and your brain, not molecules or integrals. This document is intended to give you some pointers about how to increase your learning power. Some people think that success depends simply on how much they study. In fact, it actually depends more on how and when they study. One hour of good studying can be as valuable as ten hours of banging your head against the wall… So it pays to ask yourself what you can do to be more effective in your learning. It may well make the difference between getting a degree and becoming a drop out. Besides, it may free up time to do something fun, too, and there is nothing wrong with a bit of fun now and then. In fact, you need that too to be successful. From high school to university: adulthood Many people find the transition from high school to university a pretty difficult experience. Many things change, not in the least because they are now expected to behave as adults. This means a lot of things: being away from mom and dad, making new friends, dealing with boyfriends, girlfriends, living in a dorm, but also: having far more responsibility for your own learning, making choices about what classes to take, dealing with a large university system, dealing with success and failure. Being an adult, it is really up to you to find what works best for you and that can be a demanding job. This document cannot do it for you, but hopefully it will give you some pointers and some things to consider and help you in the process. Please keep in mind that this story is written for the (non-existent) “average freshman” in CH101. It is a compilation of the learning topics I do in my class. I am sure that you are not “average”, perhaps not in CH101 or not even a freshman. Thus, only certain things may apply in your case. Other things may not, but then they might apply for other students. The resources at your disposal University learning is much more about you actively using resources that are put at your disposal than about you passively ‘being taught’. In fact with 250 students on their hands, do not expect to “be taught by” your instructors at all. Rather expect to “learn from” your instructors. That sounds like a subtle play of words, but it really is not. In one case you sit there passively to be ‘spoon-fed’, in the other you actively go hunt your own food. And that can make all the difference.One could say that, in a sense, any university is as good as you make it to be. The faculty cannot make you learn any more than they can make a horse drink; they can only lead it to the water. Vice versa, there is little a professor can do to stop you from learning if you are determined to do so. Therefore to a considerable extent we faculty depend upon you to make this a good university. (Go pack!) Of course, we can be very useful to you in your learning, but nothing is more demotivating for us that you just sitting there . (So, please be a wolf, not a log…) There is a whole menu of things that you can try and weave into your study practices and you need to do some experimenting to see what works best for you. And yes, it is part of your job as a student to try them out and optimize your study skills. How to use the textbook Get confused The book has many functions, but the first and perhaps most important one is this: Read your book BEFORE class. The purpose of this is to get confused. That sounds silly, but it is not: the truth is that we all get confused by what we are supposed to learn at some point in time. The proper timing of your confusion is crucial. If you postpone the point of confusion till the evening before the test, your test results will clarify your confusion in rather painful ways. F’s are instructive, but not pleasantly so. It is much better to get confused before class than after, because it gives your instructors the chance to un-confuse you in lecture. (If not, you should make them.) This already means you have used both the book (to confuse) and the instructor (to clarify) and thus made a good beginning. Studying is not reading Of course just reading the book before class is not nearly enough. You need to study it afterwards. Studying is more than just reading. It means that you work on it sufficiently that you can put it away and teach somebody else what is in it. If no human victim is available, take a wall and teach it chemistry. Obviously just reading the book once more is not going to allow you to do that, so you will have to go back to your book quite a few times, if your wall does not understand you. It is actually the repetition that will allow you to be able to call the contents your mental property at some point. Human memory functions at various levels. Look at something once and you still know it a minute later, but not two. Look at it again two minutes later and you may remember an hour later. Look at it a third time an hour later and you know it the next day and so on. So studying requires a sufficient number of repeats. Therefore, reading the book before class is a good start of this repetition, because then the lecture will already count as repeat #2. Diagrams A good way to convey scientific meaning is to use a diagram. Unfortunately, people often treat them the way they do with commercials on TV: ignore them as useless visuals. Study diagrams until you understand what they are trying to say. Don’t skip them! Teach them to your favorite wall!Later reactivation Another function of the book is to be able to revisit the things you do forget, even after the course is over. That makes selling the textbook a very expensive proposition. It’s like selling part of your memory. Most of what you learn in a class will hide itself in this big underground cellar of your subconscious mind. No, it is not gone. You just need to learn how to reactivate it later in life. Looking at your old book is a fine way to do that. How to use the lectures If a lecture does not exhaust you, there is something wrong. Ideally, the lecture should be the most exhausting part of the whole process, because you are being