11 HABITS OF HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL STUDENTS

Attend every class. if you miss any classes, you miss important material.

Do all assignments and give yourself time to do a good job. Start budgeting time for the assignment as soon as it is assigned. Don’t wait until it is due.

Study every day. After class type up your notes. Coordinate them with other class readings. Go over these notes every single day. When test time comes, you will have absorbed the earlier material. You just have new material to memorize.

Be an active reader. Annotate your textbooks. Underline important points and write in the margins. Have some shorthand symbols like “EX” for examples or an * for important material. Pay attention to clues like “Three reasons…” Make sure you get all those reasons. Use a journal to write about what you have read. Reread passages that you don’t at first understand.

Understand the difference between main point and support in textbook readings.

Get copies of textbooks before the class begins. Read and annotate them.

Do more than is expected. If the teacher tells you to do problems 2,4 and 6, also do 1,3 and 5.

Introduce yourself to the instructor and plan on meeting with the instructor as least three times during the semester. These professionals can give you tips on how to get a better grade in their classes.

If you need a tutor, get one.

Form a study group, so you and other students can work together. What one student does not get, another one will. Help each other. Learn some memory techniques like chaining, pegging and mnemonics.

Chaining is telling a silly story and including items you need to memorize. To memorize the names of the U.S. presidents.

You are WASHING a TON of Clothes. See yourself by the WASHING machine with TONs of clothes. The door bell rings. A naked man wearing only a fig leaf is standing there. He must be ADAM, the first man except that there are several other men wearing fig leafs. ADAMS. They want to use the JOHN.

You get the idea. Make the story ridiculous so you are more likely to remember it, and visualize as you go.

Pegging is plugging new material to be learned to a list you already memorized. That might be the days of the week, the months, the alphabet.

To learn the names of the presidents you might use yearly holidays. Picture George Washington as the New Year’s baby. John Adams is Cupid for February and Valentine’s Day. Thomas Jefferson is all in green and wearing Shamrocks.

Mnemonics are memory helpers. To memorize Pi or any long number construct a sentence where each word has the same number of letters and order as the number to memorize.

Pi to the tenth is 3.1415926535. (3) May (1) I (4) have (1) a (5) large (9) container (2) of (6)coffee,(5) cream (3) and (5) sugar. You get the idea.

To remember what happened to Henry VIII’s wives: Divorced, Beheaded, Died, Divorced, Beheaded, Survived.

Invent some of your own mnemonics if none are available.

Repetition is important even if using memory helpers.

UNSCHOOLING - HOW ONE STUDENT - ME - MADE IT WORK.

Has unschooling ever worked for any student? It did for me.

I fell in love with American history at a young age. I read books about the American Revolution, westward movement and the presidents. Every week I went to the library and selected two of three books to devour. I read all of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s and Zane Gray’s books. I loved John Dickson Carr, whose mystery stories included locked room puzzles. They were great lessons in critical thinking, not that I knew that then.

Despite my passion for reading, I was not doing well in school. I was a strange kid with stringy brown hair that would not hold the bouffant hair styles so popular then. I wore thrift shop clothes, had cavities in my teeth and just didn’t make friends very well.

On the bus and on the playground, the bullies tormented me. I was ashamed of not having friends to play with, so I tried to hide in the bathroom with a book. The teachers would make me go outside.

I hated the lunches, so the teachers picked on me about that.

I was bored with the lessons. We studied the same things every year. Apostrophes have to be the most boring thing on earth, not to mention comparative and superlative adjectives.

I did poorly in all my subjects except history and English. I did well in history because it didn’t bore me, though the textbooks were not as good as the books I took from the library.

I did well in English because I was a reader. Maybe I didn’t know the comma rules or the nouns and verbs and other rules, but I had seen enough proper sentences in books that I could recognize the correct version. I was like a musician who plays by ear. I read and wrote by ear.

School did take its toll on me. I stopped even trying to study. I retreated into a world of daydreams. I watched television and read books because the fantasy worlds in both fed my daydreams.

But I did not just learn in books.

I joined a humane society and a writers club. These were adult evening activities, so even though I had no friends my own age, I spent time with intelligent mature people who did not repeat the same boring material over and over.

Unschooling will not work for all students. Most students don’t skip school to go to the library like I did. They have little or no interest in history, animal welfare or writing, but there has to be alternatives to public school for those of us who do not thrive there and cannot learn there.

Homeschooling is a great option, but most parents don’t have the resources for homeschooling. It takes time, effort and money.

What other options are there?

The granny cloud works in India, and I will have more about that and other options in future columns.

Intend to learn. So many students want to learn just until test time, and then they promptly forget. Education is expensive and time consuming. Get your money's worth.

Learn something. Most students are now between semesters, but that does not mean we stop learning. Spend school holidays learning American Sign Language, French, or a new sport. The children of wealthy families are encouraged to learn between semesters. The rest of us can greatly add to our intellectual wealth at this time too.