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The opposite of this is Po Shen Loh's "bulldozer method" of doing every single exercise in a book, as described by Dan Luu here: https://threadreaderapp.com/thr

• BizarroLand 3y ago
  I didn't know it at the time but that is what I used to get through college math. I was always good at math as a kid so I never had to try, but I took time off between high school and college and it left me severely out of my weight class when college math started. The Math 100 book started on chapter 6, as 1-5 was for remedial Math 99, so while I was struggling to cope with Math 100 stuff I was also working my way through the remedial chapters so I could catch up with my class. Took me 6 weeks of going to school and/or going to work, then going to Taco Bell and sitting down with a diet soda and doing math for 2-3 hours almost every day to catch up, but I managed to pull it off by doing every single math problem in the book.
• philomath_mn 3y ago
  Reminds me of my favorite dumb observation from grad school: the textbook is your friend. I was doing ok in Abstract Algebra, but really wanted to bump up from a B to an A. So I spent the last few weeks slowly reading every chapter and doing almost every exercise. By the end of the semester I felt much more comfortable and got the top score on the final. Only took me 20 years to figure it out, but reading the textbook and doing the exercises are effective ways to learn (duh).