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The real truth is that the good advice has always been dispensed, it's just that students don't want to listen. 1. Follow actively the lessons. 2. Study and e

The real truth is that the good advice has always been dispensed, it's just that students don't want to listen. 1. Follow actively the lessons. 2. Study and exercise every day what you covered in the previous lessons Every one of us has been given these age old platitudes, but, as spaced repetition, testing, and active recall prove, they are actually an excellent starting point for good performance

sfn42 1y ago
They told us which chapters to read before each lecture, nobody else that I knew did it. I did. It was super helpful.
- ido 1y ago
  I suspect the reason is that most late-teens/early-twenty-somethings are not responsible/emotionally mature enough to put in the required amount of work in the relatively free environment of university where nobody is checking if you’re doing your homework or show up to class.
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    Related, for me, was that high school just wasn't very challenging. I got As without ever really studying or feeling that I was working very hard. I took that approach into university and it worked for my freshman and most of my sophomore courses. Then things got actually tough and I realized I could not just intuit my way through exams, and I had never really learned how to study.
    - 9dev 1y ago
      Failing to realise that school was just about learning how to learn was also the main mistake I made, for the same reason as you. I was always good at soaking up stuff I found interesting, but to this day learning something because I have to is hard, awful work.
  - quacked 1y ago
    Every undergraduate student I met over the age of 22 was much, much better than their young counterparts within the same ability cohort.
    - SoftTalker 1y ago
      I've read that the highest levels of brain development are not complete until about age 25.
      - Jach 1y ago
        Unfortunately this is a pop-sci myth similar to the "you only use 10% of your brain" myth.
chrisgd 1y ago
For two years I wrote notes in class on yellow legal pad. After class, I rewrote into a spiral notebook, one for each class. That way I only carried a legal pad to each class everyday. Not surprisingly, my grades those two years were great. Never had the fortitude to keep it up.
- zahlman 1y ago
  Strange, I would have thought that a habit successfully kept for two years (or even considerably less than that) might as well be permanent.
Aurornis 1y ago
The problems were more obvious to me when I was older and trying to mentor college students. Some of them just got it, absorbed good advice like a sponge, rejected bad advice, and did their best. They were unsurprisingly successful in life (for their own definitions of success, which wasn't always monetary) The most frustrating cases were the students who got baited by angry internet advice. Reddit was a frequent source of bad advice. Some got pulled into 4Chan or Something Awful (depending on the era). Others were in weird IRC channels or Discords. All of them got poisoned by cynical online junk. I'd hear the weirdest things about how they'd rationalize that studying was bad, degrees were useless, and nothing mattered. Some tried to lecture me on how the world was ending, the economy was collapsing, and therefore nothing mattered anyway. The hardest type for me to mentor were the students who had a bottomless bucket of excuses to pull from for everything in their life. Nothing was ever their fault, even if their failure was unambiguously traceable back to their lack of studying. It was always the fault of their professor, their roommate, their parents, their students, their friends, or even their mentors (me) because they had trained themselves to find someone or something to blame in every situation. Not surprisingly they were always failing to progress in life until they hit some situation that forced self-reflection and learning. Some of them managed to turn it around, but I can still find many of them angrily ranting into LinkedIn or other social media to this day. Mentoring was hard. It was rewarding to work with the students who wanted to learn and knew how to prefer good advice over bad. For some it felt like most of the battle was just keeping them away from bad influences and resisting the urge to run to Reddit to find something that helped them believe nothing was their fault.
- zahlman 1y ago
  > (for their own definitions of success, which wasn't always monetary) > I'd hear the weirdest things about how they'd rationalize that studying was bad, degrees were useless, and nothing mattered. Some tried to lecture me on how the world was ending, the economy was collapsing, and therefore nothing mattered anyway. To be fair, it does seem to be pretty bad out there if your only definition of success is monetary. But your general point about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control absolutely is well taken.
- weitendorf 1y ago
yodsanklai 1y ago
> 1. Follow actively the lessons. It sounds obvious, but I wonder if this works for everyone. I've always had a very hard time to follow lessons (I studied maths then CS), but did work hard on the side and ultimately did quite well at tests and national exams. I think the lecture format didn't work well for me, and I would have been better off with the just material, and access to a professor for questions.
jatins 1y ago
Yeah, it's like most people know exercise is good for body. But good luck my rational mind getting me to the gym on most days That said I do think even the seemingly obvious need to be repeated often because the audience keeps changing. So it is _new_ for someone, it may change someone's perspective

sfn42 1y ago

They told us which chapters to read before each lecture, nobody else that I knew did it. I did. It was super helpful.

ido 1y ago
I suspect the reason is that most late-teens/early-twenty-somethings are not responsible/emotionally mature enough to put in the required amount of work in the relatively free environment of university where nobody is checking if you’re doing your homework or show up to class.
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  Related, for me, was that high school just wasn't very challenging. I got As without ever really studying or feeling that I was working very hard. I took that approach into university and it worked for my freshman and most of my sophomore courses. Then things got actually tough and I realized I could not just intuit my way through exams, and I had never really learned how to study.
  - 9dev 1y ago
    Failing to realise that school was just about learning how to learn was also the main mistake I made, for the same reason as you. I was always good at soaking up stuff I found interesting, but to this day learning something because I have to is hard, awful work.
- quacked 1y ago
  Every undergraduate student I met over the age of 22 was much, much better than their young counterparts within the same ability cohort.
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    I've read that the highest levels of brain development are not complete until about age 25.
    - Jach 1y ago
      Unfortunately this is a pop-sci myth similar to the "you only use 10% of your brain" myth.

chrisgd 1y ago

For two years I wrote notes in class on yellow legal pad. After class, I rewrote into a spiral notebook, one for each class. That way I only carried a legal pad to each class everyday. Not surprisingly, my grades those two years were great. Never had the fortitude to keep it up.

zahlman 1y ago
Strange, I would have thought that a habit successfully kept for two years (or even considerably less than that) might as well be permanent.

Aurornis 1y ago

The problems were more obvious to me when I was older and trying to mentor college students. Some of them just got it, absorbed good advice like a sponge, rejected bad advice, and did their best. They were unsurprisingly successful in life (for their own definitions of success, which wasn't always monetary) The most frustrating cases were the students who got baited by angry internet advice. Reddit was a frequent source of bad advice. Some got pulled into 4Chan or Something Awful (depending on the era). Others were in weird IRC channels or Discords. All of them got poisoned by cynical online junk. I'd hear the weirdest things about how they'd rationalize that studying was bad, degrees were useless, and nothing mattered. Some tried to lecture me on how the world was ending, the economy was collapsing, and therefore nothing mattered anyway. The hardest type for me to mentor were the students who had a bottomless bucket of excuses to pull from for everything in their life. Nothing was ever their fault, even if their failure was unambiguously traceable back to their lack of studying. It was always the fault of their professor, their roommate, their parents, their students, their friends, or even their mentors (me) because they had trained themselves to find someone or something to blame in every situation. Not surprisingly they were always failing to progress in life until they hit some situation that forced self-reflection and learning. Some of them managed to turn it around, but I can still find many of them angrily ranting into LinkedIn or other social media to this day. Mentoring was hard. It was rewarding to work with the students who wanted to learn and knew how to prefer good advice over bad. For some it felt like most of the battle was just keeping them away from bad influences and resisting the urge to run to Reddit to find something that helped them believe nothing was their fault.

zahlman 1y ago
> (for their own definitions of success, which wasn't always monetary) > I'd hear the weirdest things about how they'd rationalize that studying was bad, degrees were useless, and nothing mattered. Some tried to lecture me on how the world was ending, the economy was collapsing, and therefore nothing mattered anyway. To be fair, it does seem to be pretty bad out there if your only definition of success is monetary. But your general point about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control absolutely is well taken.
weitendorf 1y ago

yodsanklai 1y ago

> 1. Follow actively the lessons. It sounds obvious, but I wonder if this works for everyone. I've always had a very hard time to follow lessons (I studied maths then CS), but did work hard on the side and ultimately did quite well at tests and national exams. I think the lecture format didn't work well for me, and I would have been better off with the just material, and access to a professor for questions.

jatins 1y ago

Yeah, it's like most people know exercise is good for body. But good luck my rational mind getting me to the gym on most days That said I do think even the seemingly obvious need to be repeated often because the audience keeps changing. So it is _new_ for someone, it may change someone's perspective