Free Download CBSE Papers: How to Organise your studies

What effect can good study habits have? I suspect native- born talents and skills—the basic abilities you’re born with—have the most to do with success in school— 50 percent, maybe even 60. And the environment in which you’re trying to learn, your health, and other such factors may account for another 10 percent, maybe 15. That leaves 25 to 40 percent for study skills.

Don’t believe that learning how to study can have such a monstrous effect? First, read How to Study, practice the skills, and watch the results. I think you’ll discover I’m right. Second, if you don’t believe study skills are so important, you must believe something like “smart kids do well because they’re smart.” Well, a lot of smart kids don’t do well. At all. Others do well in school but test poorly. And many are great in some subjects and not so great in others. I don’t have to prove this. Look at your friends, at others in your school. I guarantee you’ll prove it to yourself.

What kind of effort are we talking about here? Another hour a night? Two hours a night? More? And what about that “study smarter, not harder” slogan that’s associated with my How to Study Program? “If I’m studying longer,” you might reasonably contend, “I’m sure as heck studying harder, at least by my definition.”

Let’s take the latter point first. You can study smarter. You can put in less time and get better results. But learning how to do so is hard, because learning of any kind takes discipline. And learning self- discipline is, to many of us, the most difficult task of all. So don’t kid yourself: You aren’t going to sit down, skim How to Study, and miraculously transform yourself from a C student to an A student. But you absolutely can achieve such results if you put in the time to learn the lessons this book contains and, more importantly, practice and use them every day.

If you’re currently doing little or nothing in the way of schoolwork, then you are going to have to put in more time and effort. How much more? Or even more generally, how long should you study? Until you get the results you want to achieve. The smarter you are and the more easily you learn and adapt the techniques in How to Study, the more likely you will spend less time on your homework than before. But the further you need to go—from Ds to As rather than Bs to As—the more you need to learn and the longer you need to give yourself to learn it.

Don’t get discouraged. You will see positive results surprisingly quickly.

Make Study Habit-Forming

If you’re doing poorly in school even while putting in a reasonable amount of study time, you’ve got poor study habits. Who knows where or when you acquired them, but failure has, to some extent, become a habit.

Good news! Not only can bad habits be broken, but they can be replaced by good habits relatively easily. Here’s your battle plan:

It is much easier to replace a habit than to break it entirely. So don’t attempt to stop poor study habits— just learn the good ones to substitute for them.
Practice, practice, practice. Practice is the motor oil that lubricates any habit’s engine. The more you do something, the more ingrained it becomes.
- Tell your friends and family of your decision to improve your study skills and do better in school. (This is a trick that works for some people, who find that the added pressure is a good motivator.)
- For others, however, such a strategy simply adds too much pressure and is more likely to backfire instead, encouraging failure. My advice would be to use such a strategy if you know it will help you, but avoid it if you know it will actually hurt.
- You don’t have to grind it out from Ds to As with no feedback. To make sure you get a “motivational jolt” from every accom- plishment, resolve to chart every inch of your progress, even if, like Robert Frost, you have “miles to go before you sleep.” You may want to set up a chart on your wall on which you list “Today’s Successes” every day. And remember the small steps you’re taking—saving five minutes on a reading assignment, finding the books you need at the library more quickly, feeling that you took good notes in a lecture, raising your hand to actually answer a professor’s question in a class discussion, and so on.
  
  Starting with the next chapter, everything in this book will concen- trate on specific strategies useful for specific tasks—paper writing, note taking, test taking, reading, and so forth. So this is probably the best place to discuss some overall study strategies that have little to do with any particular task but everything to do with your eventual study success.
  
  Get Ready to Become a “Lifer”
  
  Learning how to study is really a long-term process. Once you under- take the journey, you will be surprised at the number of landmarks, pathways, side streets, and road signs you’ll find. Even after you’ve transformed yourself into a better student than you’d ever hoped to be, you’ll inevitably find one more signpost that offers new information, one more pathway that leads you in an interesting new direction.

Consider learning how to study a lifelong process, and be ready to modify anything you’re doing as you learn other methods.

This is especially important right from the start, when you consider your overall study strategies. How long should you study per night? How do you allocate time between subjects? How often should you schedule breaks? Your answers to these questions are going to vary considerably depending on how well you were doing before you read this book, how far you have to go, how interested you are in getting there, how involved you are in other activities, the time of day, your general health, and a host of other individual factors.

What’s your study sequence? Hardest assignments first? Easiest? Longest? Shortest? Are you comfortable switching back and forth from one to another, or do you prefer to focus on a single assignment from start to finish?

What’s your study strategy? Your high school history teacher may want you to memorize a series of battles, dates, and generals. Your college professor will expect a deeper understanding of the battles, how they related to the overall conduct of the war, and how they affected or were affected by what was occurring in the rest of the world. Your teacher’s emphasis will change the way you study.

This gets even more difficult (believe it or not!) when you consider that the tasks themselves may have a great effect on your schedule. When I sit down to plan out the chapter of a book, for example, I need a relatively long period of uninterrupted time—at least an hour, perhaps as long as three hours. That enables me to put my notes in the order I want them and think through the entire chapter—writing transitions in my head, noting problem areas, figuring out where I need an example or illustration. If I only have half an hour before a meeting or appointment, I wouldn’t even attempt to start such a project.

What’s the lesson in all of this? There is no ideal, no answer— certainly no “right” answer—to many of the questions I’ve posed. It’s a message you’ll read in these pages again and again: Figure out what works for you and keep on doing it. If it later stops working or doesn’t seem to be working as well, change it.None of the study techniques discussed at length in this book is carved in stone. Not only should you feel free to adapt and shape and bend them to your own needs, you must do so.

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Wednesday, June 22, 2022

How to Organise your studies

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