Harvard University’s new Great Teachers project videos got us excited not only about teaching but also being a student.  One of the best ways to succeed in school is do your homework – about your teachers!  Find out who is the best instructor for Biology, Math or Ancient Literature.  Then get your self into their class!

Talk with other students, talk to other instructors and listen for the teachers they love.  Then go into the registrar office oh-so-early in the morning (right when it opens) to make sure you get into the right class.  With the right teacher. Your grades will improve because you will enjoy the class.  A little work pays off in a lot of learning.

Here’s Harvard’s Jonathen Zittrain to help you see why great teachers are important.

Harvard’s Great Teachers: Jonathan Zittrain from Derek Bok Center on Vimeo.

Not everyone is good at memorization. Have you noticed? Some people easily absorb long lists of facts and recite pages from their books for fun. Others wrestle just to remember their own phone number. Yet the same person who forgets their phone number can remember pictures, faces and places with ease.

Has anyone told you “I can’t remember your name but your face is sooo familiar”? That’s because your brain remembers pictures and places better than words. What did your family cat look like when you were a kid? That’s easy. Just picture kitty cat sitting on the couch in your mind. You can ‘view’ the scene in your head and describe everything you need.

I’d like to introduce you to an ancient memory trick that helps us ‘visual’ memory people recall words and facts. It’s called Method of Loci i meaning ’technique of places’. How does it work? You use familiar places and images to ‘stick’ your facts and words. Here’s how you do it:

1. Use a familiar place like your house or your dorm room.
2. Set up ‘stations’ or ‘rooms’ that will become stops along a ‘memory walk ‘.
3. Write up the material you need to memorize on a sheet or list. Perhaps your chemistry class already gave you a list of equations to memorize. Have the list in hand.
4. Create a ‘walk’ which starts at one place and moves through a series of rooms or stops. This walk should be the same walk you use each time you want to memorize. The same stops in the same order.
5. Walk to your first ‘stop’ (such as the front door) and stand still. Read the first fact or item you need to memorize out load. Then close your eyes and repeat it again. You might even write it onto a post-it note and hang it there at the front door.
6. Move on to the next stop (such as the kitchen stove) and read your second item out loud. Now close your eyes briefly and say the item again out loud.
7. Continue on your walk until you have covered all the facts or items you need to memorize. Ideally your memory walk should have enough ‘stops’ to memorize your whole list and return you to the starting point.
8. Now walk the whole memory circuit again, stopping at each station and reading out your fact.
9. Do the circuit three or four times, preferably on different days.

When the exam comes, imagine your self standing in the location where your started your memory walk.  Then visually recreate the walk in your mind.  The facts or items you memorized during your walk should easily return to your mind as you imagine yourself moving through the ‘stops’ of your Loci walk.

Extra Credit Tip

Sometimes you need more ‘stations’ than your little dorm room allows.  Don’t fret!  You can use furniture or other familiar items in a room to make more memory stops.  Each room should have no more than five items you use to ‘hang’ your memory items on.  Pick the same items in each room in the same order every time.  Like door – chair – desk – bed – sink.  Some people use this method to memorize hundreds of facts.  Yes … hundreds.

Checking the time you see it’s 9:30 in the morning already. Where did the morning go? Your exam is in 30 minutes! And you haven’t even opened up that extra book you were supposed to read for the test.

Sound familiar?

While we don’t recommend leaving your book until the painfully last moment, there is a way to drink in the main points of a book in under ten minutes. You won’t be prepared of every question on the test but you will have a handle on the big topics and main themes. You should be able to recognize many of the test questions and increase your grade significantly.

Here’s how.

1. Open the book and use a blank, flat card or blank piece of paper to push down the page, covering up things after you read them. This will prevent re-reading and help you focus. 
2. Scan the table of contents paying close attention to what topics are covered and the themes. 
3. Then open the first chapter and read the first two paragraphs of that chapter. No more. 
4. Scan through the rest of the chapter looking for highlight and key points. If there are any lists or tables, make sure you scan these carefully. Also be sure to note any sub-chapter section headers. When you come to the end of the chapter, read the final two paragraphs. 
5. Then move on to the next chapter and repeat the process.

For a typical 300 page book this read-scan-read method should take you less than 10 minutes to cover the whole book. You won’t be an expert when you are done but you will know a whole lot more than you did ten minutes ago. If you have another 5 minutes, pick the chapter that sounds like it is the most likely to be covered on the exam and read-scan-read it again.

Once you have reviewed the book, put it away and go take your test.  You are as prepared as you can be.  You are certainly  a whole lot more ready than you were 10 minutes ago.

Have you ever played Jeopardy? It is an old-fashioned TV game show where contestants generate a quiz question based on the answer that is provided by the host. People love to watch the show and attempt to figure out the questions before the contestants.

For a great way to study, find a friend from class and play your own game of Jeopardy — one person reads the answer to a question that might show up on the test and the other person comes up with a question to match the answer.

Here are some examples:
Answer: Golgi
Question: What is the cell structure that processes and packages proteins?

Or

Question: What internal cellular structure is often called an ‘apparatus’?