I’m Unstuck, but I’m Now Lost in the Forest

Having looked in the last postat trying to get unstuck during the study of a subject, we saw how Goofy eventually got unstuck from the trombone. But what we didn't discuss was how he ended up after getting unstuck. He flew through the air and ended up inside a bush far from the Mickey Mouse Club House.

Art Babbit is credited with creating Goofy (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What I would like to look at in this post is what you do after you have gained some degree of understanding from your reading of your textbook and notes. The whole purpose of the previous post was understanding. What I would like to do now is extend that further. In a sense, this post is going to enable you to deepen that initial level that hopefully you were able attain.

Classify and Arrange what you have Read and Understood

Remember, at this stage, you are not doing any "studying". You aren't necessarily directly applying any of the chunking principles that we have discussed before. However, this aspect of classifying and arranging the information that you have understood is absolutely crucial to help you before you actually begin the task of memorizing, and applying the information to problem-based and equation- or solution-based examinations.

Textbook (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

1. Put infrastructure and textbooks side-by-side. As I noted previously, often your lecture notes will be your infrastructure. The lecturers will give you a very good idea as to what type of skeleton they like their subject they want their subject to have; and how to apply that to each lecture. However, not every lecturer is of the same quality. Now that you have gained some degree of understanding, put your lecture "skeleton" next to your textbook/textbooks. This is the crucial question : does the lecture-note skeleton measure up to your understanding of your textbook/s reading?If not, see the next point.

Pile of textbooks, reading glasses, and a calculator. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

2. Begin to create your own infrastructure. Yes! You are allowed to do this! One of the driving forces of Schooled for Life is that the Student is the one drives the learning, not the lecturer! You are in control of how to arrange the information to suite how you understand and remember that information! But, don't misunderstand me here. I am not saying you are allowed to change the facts themselves. I cannot suddenly barge into my lecturer's office and say "The earth is the centre of the universe." Well, I suppose I could, but I wouldn't exactly get very far within the academic community, would I? No. What I am saying is that the way the infrastructure is arranged and given to you can be changed any way you want it to be changed.

Skeletons (Photo credit: Jollyboy)

3. Create your own "textbook". We live in the digital age. Scanning sections in textbooks can take seconds. Arranging them can take seconds. What I mean by "Create your own textbook" is that you can now add the relevant information onto the infrastructure that you have now created. If you are short on time, you could simply draw a large skeleton and write page reference numbers with the relevant textbook under each branch or limb of the skeleton. If you have more time, you can literally create your own textbook by digitally using your own infrastructure as a type of Contents Page, and scan the relevant pages from the textbooks and paste them into the pages in a word processor on your computer. Then, either print it out, or use it on your computer as your own textbook. Be sure to reference all the scans. You could also make a large textbook on a wall in your room. Draw the skeleton, and Prestik the scanned sections from the textbooks under each relevant limb of the infrastructure. In the next post, I am going to begin a more detailed look at chunking, and will follow that with a cross-referencing system that will blow your mind!

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Help! I’m stuck!

Art Babbit is credited with creating Goofy (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My little boys are going through a phase of loving to watch Mickey Mouse Clubhouse on DSTV. We've got the whole all the songs memorized by now! One of the episodes that we have recorded on our PVR decoder has a segment where Goofy gets stuck inside Donald Duck's huge Trombone, and they have try and remove him from it. Eventually they do, obviously.

trombone 025 (Photo credit: Angela Hawkins)

But, I know that students can get to a point in their studies where they feel like their bums are stuck inside a trombone and they can't get any further! I received an email from a student just the other day asking me about this very topic. I want to issue a disclaimer before I continue this post - every subject is different. Biochenistry (the subject this student emailed me about) is a very tricky area to deal with and has it's own set of problems. And each subject has its own set of issues. I cannot go into details for each subject so this post is going to be full of generalizations. But I will obviously be helping that student individually. If any of you have specific problems, please feel free to post below or to email me at dave@schooledforlife.com or dave1314@gmail.com.

1. Start with your lecture notes. If you have followed my suggestions about taking good lecture notes, then you will probably have a good

071 J_01a Page Two from H. P. Lovecraft 18-Nov-1932 Letter to E. Hoffmann Price 9 X 7.6 From the 10-May-1981 Envelope to William Hart (Photo credit: California Cthulhu (Will Hart))

infrastructure with which to begin working with your subject.

2. Read your textbook for understanding. Take the textbook that is prescribed reading for your course and read the relevant section for understanding, not necessarily for memorizing. Read the section with highlighters, pencils and a notebook at hand for you to jot down any questions you have. Remember, you are reading to understand, so memorizing you are going to leave for a later stage. This particular step is fit for a whole series of topics all on its own, and perhaps we can delve into that in the near future.

3. Read other textbooks. Here, find books that simplify the information. A medical example would be Human Anatomy For Dummies. These books will often break down the information into understandable chunks and explain it in such a way that you can immediately grasp and begin to apply.

4. Seek out knowledgeable students.Take note of those in your class who seem to be pretty clued up on what is going on in the course you are struggling with. If you have a good relationship with them, approach them and ask them if they wouldn't mind explaining some of the key concepts to you, and perhaps showing you how they approach studying the subject. You don't need to even find a student on your own class, you could find one who is a year or two ahead of you who you know did well in that particular subject. Again, offer to buy them a cup of coffee, spend time with them and absorb information like a sponge.

Students of Saint Mary's Hall (Photo credit: Robert of Fairfax)

5. Speak to your lecturer. Some lecturers are simply on another planet and cannot be reached by any conventional means. In this case, see point number 3! However, fairly frequently, lecturers are quite willing to spend time helping you if they can see you are struggling with their subject. Make an initial appointment, prepare what you are going to ask them, bring all your books and notes along, and then grill them!

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Take your reading to the next level

You are sitting at your desk. You have read the same paragraph seven times, and the words are starting to blur into one another. But you need to understand what you are reading! It's essential for your assignment. What do you do? Get up, grab a cup of filter coffee and a double chocolate muffin, and then do these four simple actions.

coffee filter Deutsch: Kaffeefilter (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

1. Arouse yourself. Do something to wake yourself up. Drink that coffee. Do twenty pull-ups or push-ups. Run up a flight of stairs. Do something to arouse yourself and re-charge the neurotransmitters in your Amyglada.

Line art drawing of push up. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

2. Make an effort of the will. You have to decide in yourself that you want to read properly. Once you have made that inner decision, you can begin to read properly. One of the things I emphasize in my posts is that you have to decide for yourself that you are going study and learn. That decision and that mental effort can only come from you. No-one else can give it to you. 3. Concentrate your attention upon your reading. It is impossible to concentrate on your reading if you have your laptop open, your ipad on, your Blackberry next to you; with you checking your emails, and your Facebook every few minutes. You need to focus your attention deliberately. You don't need Ritalin. You need discipline! 4. Insist upon understanding it. As you read it, you must insist upon understanding each and every sentence you read. Make sure you understand how the author makes his main statement and build his or her arguments and defends his position. If there is something you don't understand, ask a friend, mark it to ask a lecturer, Google it, or check it in another textbook.

Understanding the concept (Photo credit: dkuropatwa)

I hope these simple ideas from George Swain's book help you in your reading.

Mindmap brainstorming : An Evangelism-Ideas Powertool

The Human:Holy-Spirit-Interface in Creative-Ideas-Generation for Evangelism and Witnessing

Seminary students, y ou start out with hearts thumping with passion and zeal (See Clint's What Vets Can Teach Seminoids). You want to stand on soap boxes and preach to crowds (and would welcome the odd tomato thrown at you - just ask Clint). You want to go on Short Term Missions trips and play basketball with the bunch of guys that gather at the local court every Thursday afternoon and lead them all to Christ with passion. Then the academics hit you like a gloved George Foreman hand. Before too long, you are burying your head in John Owen, John MacArthur, John Piper, Jonathan Edwards (why so many Johns?). Why? Because you need to learn the Truth. In order to be able to teach your flock, you need to be able to teach. The main qualification of an elder is he must be able to teach. How can he teach if he has not been taught? So your Professors want to pump you full of as much information as possible, and to equip you to be able to continue learning and to teach others. But a significant side-effect of this is that your creative ideas for evangelizing may dry up. You know you are utterly unable to save anyone at all - it is entirely and completely a work of God through the Holy Spirit. But, God also gives us creativity. Just because we should rely on the Holy Spirit and prayer, it doesn’t mean we must sit on the park bench and expect someone to walk up to us and say “Please tell me how I must be saved?” It isn’t going to happen. This is where my secret weapon comes in. Here are four steps to use mindmapping techniques to stimulate your creativity... 1. Use life experience. Douglas Wilson says on page 23 of his excellent book Wordsmithy,

“When you are out and about, you are watching the gaudy show called life and are trying to learn from it. This is harder to do if you are busy being the star of the show.”

Learn to use all your senses when you are out and about. When you go out for coffee, don’t just pull out your textbook and scribble study notes. Put away your books, sit back and watch people. Watch the way people interact with one another. Watch how people sit when they are obvious lovers. Volunteer at an orphanage; at an animal shelter. Do things that expose you to a variety of things in life. This all adds rich fodder to your imagination and to your experience. 2. Use the right material. You will need a large piece of paper (I like using an A1 or an A2 size piece of paper), and obviously a pen. I don’t like using computer software to do this kind of mindmapping. For brainstorming, you want to be able to see all of your ideas at one glance.

And if you are coming up with 20 to 30 ideas, you want to be able to see them all at once. Included in the right material is the right space (a good sized desk), free from distractions (switch off your cell phones, close your laptop and put away your iPad), in the right frame of mind (well rested, spiritual affairs “in order”). Use multiple different colored pens and highlighters for grouping and highlighting and linking your ideas later one. If you have space on your wall in your study, you can later use that space to put your large brainstormed mindmaps on it. 3. Don’t edit as you write. I cannot stress this enough. Even if you think that your idea is completely far out and totally unrelated to witnessing and evangelism, write it down anyway. Do this for two reasons. First, the Holy Spirit has His own reasons for prompting the thought in you. Second, your brain may have a formed a dendritic connection somewhere deep in your frontal lobe that may only become apparent to you a little later in the brainstorming process. During the process of the brainstorming, your brain will start to connect those concepts subconsciously. Complex brain imaging has recently shown us that in a situation like this, even if we are working on something else, subconsciously, our brain will be attempting to find the neural pathway to connect what you wrote with the topic at hand. 4. Highlight and connect ideas that can be grouped together. After you are absolutely sure you have run out of ideas, leave your mindmap overnight. Come back to it the next morning and sit with it for about another 15 minutes or so and see if there are any new ideas that come to the fore. New brain imaging techniques have shown definitively that our brains process information and perform actual problem-solving during certain phases of sleep. That’s why the old adage “I’ll sleep on it” is actually true! Once you are sure your ideas have run out, haul out your highlighters and colored pens. Start to group your ideas and link them. At this point it is up to you if you want to create another mindmap that is neater and better organized. But you may be like me and become affectionately attached to your original mindmap! Whichever you choose, the main point here is chunking your ideas into cohesive groups that you can use in the final point. 5. Convert your chunks into plans of action. Now that you have chunked your information, it is time to convert those chunks into plans of action.

Ask the Holy Spirit to show you how you can develop these action plans. I would suggest following the simple P.P.E.F. formula: a. Plan your strategy. Perhaps this means adjusting your schedule to allow you to go to that basketball court every Thursday afternoon at 4 p.m. b. Prepare for your action. This could take the form of ensuring you are fit enough and know enough to be able to easily fit in and play a good competitive game of basketball (although don’t be too competitive - winning isn’t your aim, remember!). Preparation could also take the form of learning about the neighborhood, the youth in the area, the needs in the area, major problems or issues in the community, or possible gang territories. Preparation could also take the form of becoming better in an area where you may be uncomfortable. Maybe you find it difficult to strike up a conversation. Well, guess what? There’s a book called Always Know what to Say by Peter Murphy that you can currently get on Amazon Kindle for free. Get creative. c. Execute the Plan. Now for some application of elastic hydrocarbon polymer to opus caementicium. (Rubber hits the concrete). There comes a time when you need transition from talking and thinking, to actual doing. So, just do it. But it might take time. Lots of it. It might take a few months to build friendships on that basketball court. Sometimes you cannot rush things. But, by the same token, you cannot let opportunities slip away. If an opportunity presents itself, grab it with both hands. d. Follow-up. This is where you bring you new prize fish to church. Introduce them to your friends at church (if they aren’t already involved in your action plan - hey, did I just give you an idea?). If they’ve declared a commitment to Christ, plug this new believer into your home-group. Bring him under your wing. Shepherd him, counsel him, teach him. You’ve got yourself a baby believer that needs the milk of the Word. Teach it lovingly and with passion and delight. And it all started with a silly old mindmap? No, it started with God, was carried out by God, was all about God, was completed by God, all for God’s glory. Related articles on Mindmaps:

Learning by chunking

Information (Photo credit: heathbrandon)

Chunking information simply means learning information in chunks. In my previous post, I spoke about chunking and about how we store between 5 and 9 bits of information in short-term memory at once. Now let's begin a series of posts on applying this to your learning. 1. Skeleton. Grab you textbook. Open to the chapter you are learning. Write down the main headings in that chapter. Most likely there will be about 7 headings or so. Understand those headings and memorize them. This is your chapter skeleton.

2. Each heading. Read the text under each heading. If there are no sub-headings, read to find out the main point of each paragraph. Write these main points out briefly in your own words. Again, you will be left with approximately 5 - 10 sentences. In your mind, connect each sentence to its heading and learn those sentences. 3. Repeat. Do this over and over again. 4. Revise. Go over each chunk of information the next day, then weekly for two weeks, then every two weeks until exams. We will go into more detail at a later stage on the actual memorizing process, including linking to information already known. This post was intended simply to give you a brief overview of chunking.