College Life
Hello everyone: What do you do if you are tired of sitting and you still have hours to study? Walk around a bit. Believe it or not, you can study while walking. Let me tell you how. When studying for my qualifying exams, I devoted six hours a day to putting information into my brain. That is a long time to sit, so I made...
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College Life
Hello everyone: Here we are at part three, where I will explain why you need the oven timer! We all claim to spend xyz hours studying, right? Now you are going to prove it to yourself. The rule of thumb is two hours of studying for every hour of class time. I don’t know many people who actually do that (I wrote about the two...
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College Life
Hello everyone: It’s always a surprise to me when students think that success is going to hit them over the head as they just stand there. Nope, folks, success in college is no accident. You have to work at it. How can you achieve your goals? By taking college seriously from the very first minute, you can increase the odds that you will do well....
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College Life
Hello everyone: Have you ever wondered why some students excel while others, who seem equally intelligent, just get by? When a student did poorly in my class, I used to think it was me. Now I know that individuals have different goals for their education. Maybe they are in college just to stay on their parents’ medical insurance policy. Maybe they are there to avoid...
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Books / College Life
Hello everyone: Have you seen them? They are the clear-eyed students sitting about halfway back in the room who never seem to need to take notes. They tell themselves that they will remember everything the instructor says, so note taking is for wimps. I see them all the time, usually in a class that they are on track to fail. In eleven years of teaching...
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College Life / Suddenly Single
Hi everyone: A student emailed me today, in a panic about failing the writing class I am teaching at a major online college. Here is what I told her about writing an assignment: Please read all instructions carefully before you begin to write. Please write the document that the instructions call for. Look at each assignment as a separate and distinct document and do not...
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