How To Be A High School Superstar Part 4

Simplify

The Ideal Student Workweek

The law of underscheduling says that you should leave significant amounts of free time in your schedule. But how much time is enough? From my experience, there's no magic number of commitments. In Part 3 of this book, for example, you'll meet a relaxed superstar named Maneesh who had periods in high school when he was a member of a large number of clubs. You might think this would have overwhelmed his schedule-but it didn't. When you dig deeper, it turns out that he would usually attend club meetings held during the school day but, as a general rule, skip anything scheduled after 3 p.m. The point is that a large number of clubs didn't add a large time commitment. Tons of students, like Maneesh, bounce in and out of a variety of minor activities-usually for social reasons-without suffering from time famine. However, I've also met plenty of students who were overwhelmed by a single demanding commitment (editing a school newspaper, for example, is famously soul-sucking).

My point here is that activity counts are meaningless, so forget, for now, how many things you do. Let's talk instead about what your day should feel like, regardless of your specific commitments. With this in mind, I have some straightforward advice for achieving a properly underscheduled lifestyle: embrace the student workday.

The concept works as follows: Every day you have a clearly identified cutoff point in the afternoon or evening that signifies that you are absolutely, nonnegotiably, done with work. The hours after this cutoff point are free for you to do whatever you want. Once you're done for the day, you're really done. This time is 100 percent unstructured and unscheduled-the type of time the law of underscheduling demands for exploration.

There are two big advantages to a student workday. First, it clearly segregates free time from work time. This sounds self-evident, but I want to emphasize that it's a huge deal. Too many students mix these together, letting their evening slosh past as a slurry of halfhearted work and aimless Internet walkabouts. To get the true benefits of free time-the mental unwinding that releases stress-the time has to be completely, unapologetically free. By hunkering down after school, getting your meetings and work done, and then saying, "I am now free to do whatever I want," you'll enjoy a profound boost to your happiness. This time, of course, is also when you can deploy the deep-interest-producing exploration that you'll learn about in the second section of this playbook.

Clear segregation of your time is just the first advantage. The second argument for embracing a student workday is that it sharpens your attention. When you're racing toward a cutoff point, you're more likely to focus on your work-actually concentrating on getting it done instead of succ.u.mbing to the half-working, half-distracted state that I call pseudowork. This focus generates better results and reduces the time required for completion by a ridiculous amount-a double whammy of goodness.

However, we're still missing a piece to the puzzle. The idea of a clear end point for the day is good-but where should this end point be located? This varies depending on the student and the workload. But for the sake of extracting the most advantage out of an underscheduled lifestyle, I'm going to give you an ambitious target: The Ideal Student Workweek During a normal week, your work should be done by dinnertime on weekdays and require one half day on either Sat.u.r.day or Sunday, but not both.

Right now, this might sound crazy. I should first clarify that by "normal" I mean a week that doesn't have an unusual workload, due, for example, to preparing for upcoming exams or the SAT, or whatever. But even allowing for these exceptions, you're probably still confounded by my optimism.

I understand.

The thought that you'll be able to finish your work by dinnertime may sound unrealistic. But have faith. In the playbook subsections that follow, I'm going to walk you through a series of specific strategies for reducing the time required by your schoolwork. You'll learn the secrets of efficient studiers. I'll pitch the idea that you should study at the local library. I'll try to convince you that Facebook is the tool of the devil. And you'll learn how to finish a surprisingly large amount of work in school before the final bell rings.

For many students, however, more efficient work habits won't be enough to make the ideal student workweek a reality. They simply have too many hard courses and too many time-consuming extracurriculars. The only solution here is to do some quitting. This prospect can be scary, but the final subsections of this section of the playbook will introduce you to what I call the art of quitting, smart advice for reducing what's on your plate in a responsible way.

Many of the relaxed superstars you've met, or will meet later in this book, were able to achieve this ideal student workweek. I'm confident that once armed with the advice that follows, you can do the same.

How to Reduce Your Homework Time by 75 Percent

Professional swim coach Wayne Goldsmith once noted an interesting phenomenon about world-cla.s.s swimmers: when major record holders were asked to reflect on their record-breaking races, they were almost always surprised by their performance. Penny Heyns, for example, a former record holder in both the 100-meter and 200-meter b.r.e.a.s.t.stroke, recalled the following about her races: "When I touched the wall, I thought, maybe a 2:30, and this felt too easy for that.... I really don't know what happened." (Penny's time of 2:23.64 set a women's Olympic record for the 200-meter b.r.e.a.s.t.stroke in 1999. The record held until 2001. The current record is 2:20.22.) According to Wayne, this reaction is more the rule than the exception. As he explains, in swimming, speed is different from effort. Any athletic person can jump into a pool and swim a lap as hard as possible. The swimmer would expend a huge amount of effort-most of it in the form of splashing-but is not likely to move all that fast. Speed, on the other hand, comes from technique: a perfect stroke rotation, a flawless kick-turn, a dive into the pool with no unnecessary drag. When swimmers break world records, it's because they achieved perfect technique during the race. They are, of course, still expending serious effort, but they're not completely draining their batteries. Too much juice and their technique might become sloppy; the speed gained by better technique dwarfs what's gained by simply swimming harder.

This is why swimmers are often surprised by how relaxed they feel during their best performances. Breaking a major record in this sport has nothing to do with pushing the body past its limit. It is, instead, dependent on finding that Zen rhythm, where all of the swimmer's carefully calibrated skills deploy with synchronous efficiency.

Students can learn a lot from the insights of Wayne Goldsmith, because with studying, like swimming, technique trumps effort. Imagine two students studying for a math exam. a.s.sume the first student studies for five hours and deploys the standard high school strategy of haphazardly reading through the textbook and randomly tackling sample problems. The second student studies for two hours and has better technique. Let's say she's built a detailed study guide that she reviews by trying to explain complicated concepts and answers to problems out loud, as if lecturing an imaginary cla.s.s, instead of just silently reading to herself.

From my experience, the second student will score at least as well as the first student, and likely even better, even though she spent less time. In both cases, technique trumps effort. Like the record-breaking swimmer, our second student will finish the test and think, "That wasn't so bad," while the first will be exhausted by the effort and probably frustrated with the outcome.

This example captures the secret behind how you can drastically reduce the hours you dedicate to homework. By teaching you better technique, I'll enable you to maintain your grades (or perhaps even improve them) while spending much less time. This is, of course, a crucial step toward achieving the ideal student workweek without coming across as a slacker.

Let's get started. Below, I describe a collection of simple ideas about your academic work habits. Some may sound like common sense, and some may surprise you, but they're all tested, and they've worked time and again in real cla.s.srooms. Put this advice into action and you'll be surprised by how little time you actually need to keep up with a high school workload.*

Technique 1: Be Organized

For each cla.s.s, keep a college-ruled notebook and a stack of plain manila folders. Take all of your notes for this cla.s.s in the notebook. For each test or paper in the cla.s.s, label a fresh folder for holding the materials you need. For a test, the folder might hold old exams and study guides. For a paper, it might hold your research material and rough drafts. You'll probably need an administrative folder for holding general information about the cla.s.s-handouts describing a.s.signment due dates, etc. The general rule, however, says that every piece of paper you get in the cla.s.sroom goes either into the trash or into a labeled folder-no exceptions.

This is all you need for your organization system: a notebook and a pile of labeled folders for each cla.s.s. It's simple, but it will save you significant amounts of time spent scrambling to find what you're looking for. It also builds a foundation of confidence-"I'm in control"-that makes it easier to adopt the more advanced techniques that follow.

Technique 2: Let Your Notes Do the Heavy Lifting

On the teenager-boredom scale, most students rate note taking slightly below watching an all-day marathon of The PBS News-Hour. The result is shoddy, halfhearted, chicken-scratched notes that aren't very useful. When it comes to studying for a test, most students are then forced to invest an absurd amount of time in trying to track down the relevant information and reformat it so that it can actually be understood. It's this relearning of information that makes studying such a mind-melting ch.o.r.e. It's also a huge waste of time.

When it comes to notes, the secret to saving time is straightforward. If you actually invest the mental energy required to learn the information when it's first presented, and then capture this learned information in an easy-to-review format, you'll find that the time needed later to prepare for the test will be drastically reduced.

Here are some tips for taking notes that live up to this standard: DON'T SIMPLY TRANSCRIBE THE FACTS SPEWED OUT BY THE TEACHER OR PRESENTED IN THE TEXTBOOK. Instead, try to organize the information into big ideas. One approach is to use the QEC (question/evidence/conclusion) method, which, as I described in How to Become a Straight-A Student, is popular among high-scoring college undergraduates. The method is simple: Reduce the information presented to you into questions paired with conclusions. Between the two, list the evidence that justifies the connection. In other words, the questions and the conclusions become a wrapper around the raw facts-transforming them into self-contained ideas.

Let's try an example. Imagine you're in an AP U.S. history cla.s.s, and your teacher is discussing the signing of the Mayflower Compact. Most students would simply try to write down everything; e.g.: The compact was signed in 1620 off the coast of Cape Cod.

It described the system of representative government to be followed by the colonists.

It ### [indecipherable chicken scratch].

The QEC method, by contrast, forces you to consider what's important about this information-not just copy it down. Notes in this format start with the question posed by the information. In the AP U.S. history example, your question might be: QUESTION: Why was the Mayflower Compact important?

As the teacher continues, record the relevant facts below the question-these will form the evidence. They'll look like our bullet points from above ("The compact was signed in 1620," etc.). You're not off the hook yet. As you record this evidence, begin thinking about what conclusion the teacher is pointing you toward. Review your evidence as it grows; keep thinking. Eventually, a conclusion will hit you. In our example, it might read something like: CONCLUSION: The Mayflower Compact established representational government as an important feature of the American colonies. This was different than the monarchies that controlled European countries. It helped lay the foundation for our current democracy.

Sometimes you won't be able to come up with a good conclusion in the heat of the moment. That's okay. In this case, write the word "CONCLUSION" in your notes and then leave the next couple of lines blank. At the end of cla.s.s, go back, look over the evidence, and try to fill in the empty spots. If you're still stuck, ask your teacher for help. Trust me, a student coming up after cla.s.s to ask an insightful question is what teachers live for.

These exact same ideas apply to the reading a.s.signments you do at home. As you pore through your textbook, take your notes in the QEC format. If you get stuck on a conclusion during homework, try rereading the introduction and conclusion of the relevant chapter. Often you'll find high-level a.n.a.lysis tucked in these bookend sections. If you're still stuck, mark this place in your notes with a question mark and ask your teacher about it the next day. Whatever you do, don't simply highlight your textbook-this does nothing to help you learn the information.

The QEC technique saves time because it forces you to process the information as it's presented. Later, when you come back to study, you're just reminding yourself of big ideas you've already learned. This is much faster than silently reviewing facts and hoping that you can come up with interesting conclusions from scratch during the test. Students who process the big ideas early end up studying less later, and scoring higher.

FOR MATH COURSES, RECORD SAMPLE PROBLEMS AND EXPLANATIONS. As the teacher walks your cla.s.s through a sample problem on the chalkboard, record the question, the answer, and the intermediate steps in your notes. If she moves too fast for you to capture all of the steps, still make sure you get the question and answer down, so you can use them to practice later.

The best math students also take notes on the teacher's explanations. For example, when the geometry teacher describes a strategy for deciding which rules to use for estimating angles, don't tune her out while waiting for the next sample problem to begin. Instead, take notes on her big-picture explanation. Math teachers invest a lot of effort into figuring out how to explain the ideas behind the techniques they teach. Take advantage of this reality by recording these ideas. Don't just record them verbatim, however, as this allows you to escape real understanding. Instead, rewrite them in your own words.

In general, when it comes to math notes, be bold with your formatting. I've seen students draw big arrows from explanatory text to steps in sample problems. I've also seen them sketch big stars next to important ideas and add little notes to themselves in the middle of a solution. This is all great. The more you engage with the material, and try to understand it, the better.

FOR DISCRETE POINTS OF INFORMATION THAT HAVE TO BE MEMORIZED-E.G., NAMES, DATES-RECORD THEM ON INDEX CARDS. Put a question on one side of the card (e.g., "What year did j.a.pan bomb Pearl Harbor?") and the answer on the other side ("1941"). It's okay to bring index cards to cla.s.s and jot down the prompts as the teacher mentions them (this saves a step later). Do the same while reading your textbook-transfer facts to be memorized straight onto the cards. To study this information, shuffle the deck and try to answer the question on each card. Put the cards that stump you into a separate pile and return to them later. There's nothing new about flashcards, but many students bypa.s.s them out of laziness. Don't do this! They're the fastest way to memorize facts.

IF YOU HAVE TO MEMORIZE LABELS ON A DIAGRAM-E.G., THE PARTS OF A CELL FOR BIOLOGY CLa.s.s-MAKE SEVERAL PHOTOCOPIES OF THE DIAGRAM WITH THE LABELS COVERED OVER. The best way to learn diagrams is to try to fill in blanked-out labels and then check the original to see how close you came to getting it right. Once you're able to re-create all of the labels from scratch, you're done. Don't get frustrated; as with the flashcards, this style of active recall takes time until the information seems to sink in. But once it sinks in, you're not going to forget it.

IF YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND SOMETHING IN CLa.s.s OR IN A READING a.s.sIGNMENT, PUT A SERIES OF BIG QUESTION MARKS IN YOUR NOTES TO CLEARLY IDENTIFY THE TROUBLE SPOT. Your goal should be to replace the question marks with the right information within forty-eight hours. There are three approaches to achieving this goal. You can go back and reread the relevant section of the textbook. You can ask the teacher. Or you can see if Google has some advice on the topic. (It's surprising how often reading a different take on the same subject can help you understand the original text better. This is especially true for math, where sites like MathWorld and Wikipedia have clear explanations for most math concepts-from geometry to multivariable calculus.) From my research on study habits, I've learned that a large amount of time spent studying is devoted to tracking down answers to these tricky questions the day before the test. If you make a habit of eliminating your confusion as it arises, you'll find that the studying process goes much faster.

All of the tips on note taking presented here aim you toward the same goal: ensuring that by the time you start studying, you've already completed most of the hard work of grappling with and conceptualizing the information covered on the test. As you approach test dates, I don't want you to have to waste a single minute trying to make sense of your notes-you should face only the much easier process of reviewing things you already understand.

So now that you have the notes down, let's learn how to study.

Technique 3: Reject Rote Review

We've discussed the stuff that happens before you begin studying. Now we'll tackle the dreaded ch.o.r.e itself. My philosophy is founded on the following belief: The absolute worst way to study is to reread your textbook and notes silently to yourself. I call this flawed technique rote review. It's how most high school students study, and it requires an incredible amount of time but produces only mediocre results.

By contrast, the fastest way to review material is to engage in active recall. This technique has you explain the relevant ideas out loud, without peeking at your notes, as if lecturing an imaginary cla.s.s. If you can explain a concept in full, articulate sentences, then you can be sure of two things: first, that you understand it, and, second, that you won't forget it. As with most of the techniques described in this section of the playbook, active recall requires more mental energy than the alternative. But in exchange, it allows you to learn the material better and in much less time.

Here are some tips for applying the active-recall approach to different types of material: Non-math Courses. If you followed my earlier advice, you've taken notes in the QEC format. As promised, this simplifies the studying you now face. Each big idea cl.u.s.ter-consisting of a question, evidence, and a conclusion-is a separate ent.i.ty to be studied. To do so, cover the evidence and conclusion and read the question. Next, try to recall the conclusion and a collection of the evidence that connects it to the question. (You don't have to recall every last piece of evidence-just enough to make a compelling argument is sufficient.) This recall should be completed out loud: speak in full and articulate sentences, as if lecturing a cla.s.s. If you get through the recall of a cl.u.s.ter without major stumbles, then you're done studying that concept. Don't bother returning. If you have trouble, review your notes and then mark the troublesome cl.u.s.ter to return to later, after the information has left your short-term memory. Don't skip the out-loud piece of this technique. If you don't speak it, you won't learn it!

Math Courses. To apply active recall to math, you should attempt to re-create the steps and answers to the sample problems recorded in your notes. You should also walk through the high-level explanations you captured (if you followed my note-taking advice, you wrote down these explanations as the teacher gave them). Don't peek at your notes during this process. If you can't recall what's important without help, then the idea has not yet stuck. Here's the crucial point: as with the non-math courses, you should narrate this review out loud. When doing sample problems, pretend you're presenting them on the chalkboard-narrating every step along the way. The same goes for the high-level explanations. You should see if you can explain them from memory, as if addressing bored students. Without the narration, you're in danger of simply memorizing the solutions without understanding the underlying concepts-a habit that will come back to haunt you when you're faced with new problems on the test.

Memorized Information. Some information, such as dates, names, and labels for diagrams, has to be straight-up memorized-there are no big ideas or complicated explanations to narrate. If you recall, I suggested that you record this information on flashcards or on diagrams with blanked-out labels. There's no shortcut to learning such information beyond working with these aids until you stop making mistakes. The good news is that this process is more mindless than the active review described above, so you can do it in small batches at random times. My main advice for this style of studying is to avoid leaving it until the last minute. Memorizing is tiring! If you're forced to do it for hours the night before a test, you'll suffer, and probably end up not learning the material all that well. A smarter approach is to start way early-maybe two to three weeks before a test-with memorization. Spend ten to fifteen minutes with your flashcards, a few times a week, as the semester progresses. You can even do this between cla.s.ses or while waiting to be picked up from school. These many small sessions add up to save you a lot of painful work at the end.

Technique 4: Write Papers over Three Days

High school students hate writing papers. More than they should. If you think about it objectively, writing a paper should seem preferable to studying for a test. There's no need to learn complicated ideas or memorize facts, and there's no worry about facing a new problem, with five minutes remaining until the bell, and suddenly realizing that you have no idea how to solve it.

A paper is written on your own terms. You're given weeks to formulate your ideas and construct something worthwhile. If you don't understand something, you can look it up. Need a break, take one. Yes, paper writing should be seen as a treat. But, of course, it's not.

The reason for this paradox is obvious: students don't start writing papers early enough, and they end up trying to cram it all into one night, which is a terrible and painful experience. This is why students hate papers-not because they're intrinsically hard, but because the way they tackle them is stupid.

It's easy to just say "Start earlier," but this rarely solves the problem by itself. When you ask yourself the vague question "Should I start today?" the answer is almost always "Nah." Every day seems busy, and without a specific schedule that you trust as making sense, procrastination will usually win out.

I want to free you from such a fate with a concrete approach to scheduling your paper writing. It can be stated as follows: If you want to write good papers without stress, use three days. The first day should be for researching. This is when you go back through the novel you read, and/or your notes from cla.s.s, and figure out what you're going to say. Capture this in a simple outline. (The format of the outline doesn't really matter; what's important is the thinking behind it.) If possible, after you finish your first draft of the outline, go do something else, preferably something relaxing. After you've cleared your head, return to your thinking fresh and see where you can make it better. This can make the difference between a pa.s.sable paper and an exceptional one.

Most students mash together the thinking and writing processes, figuring out what they want to say as they're saying it. This leads to rambling, semi-incoherent papers, and makes the whole process more painful than it needs to be. You can sidestep this whole mora.s.s by isolating the thinking to its own day. Once you're done with your outline, stop.

The second day is for writing. Using the outline from the research day, scratch out a decent draft of your paper. Don't worry about careful editing. This day is about getting your argument into reasonably crafted words. When you finish this draft, as before, stop for the day.

The third and final day is for editing. I usually recommend at least two pa.s.ses. You can do the first pa.s.s on your computer. Look for obvious mistakes, and fix your structure and transitions. In general, make the paper read like a good paper. When you finish, it will still have small mistakes, but its overall shape will be solid. For the second pa.s.s, print out a draft and read it out loud. This is the fastest way to root out the remaining small issues. If you skip using your voice, and insist on reading silently to yourself, you will miss things. One out-loud pa.s.s is better (and faster) than multiple silent read-throughs.

You need at least one full night's rest between each of these three days. The days don't, however, have to be consecutive. It's fine, for example, to research a week before the due date, and then write and edit in the final two days. What you cannot do is combine any of the days. This holds even if the paper is short and requires only a couple of hours from start to finish-keep the separation intact. By doing so, you'll not only significantly improve the quality of your work, but you'll also make it significantly less painful. Better yet, this approach reduces the impact of the paper on your schedule. Doing an hour or two of work each day, over three days, makes it possible to maintain your ideal student workweek. By contrast, an all-night marathon is brutal and can bust your attempts to enforce a consistent work cutoff point.

"But wait!" you cry. "I'm too much of a procrastinator to start three days early! I can only do the work with a deadline looming."

I must respond to this common reaction with some tough love: Suck it up. If your goal is to succeed in compet.i.tive college admissions, you're going to have to embrace some self-control. I'm not asking you to be rigidly disciplined. Instead, I'm asking that you add just a little more structure to your process. The good news is that the urge to procrastinate diminishes when your mind actually trusts that your schedule makes sense. The three-day rule works, and your mind will believe this. The result is that you'll require less willpower than you might have feared to stick with the plan.

Now let's tackle our final technique for easing your homework requirements.

Technique 5: Study like Darwin

The note-taking, studying, and paper-writing techniques I described above really work. I've observed dozens-if not hundreds-of students find success with these approaches. They shouldn't be, however, the final word on the subject. Every student is a little different, and every cla.s.s presents its own unique demands. With this in mind, perhaps the most important piece of advice I can give you is to always be experimenting and improving your own personal set of study habits.

After every test or paper, put aside a few minutes to perform a short postmortem on the experience. Ask yourself the following questions: What preparation helped me?

What preparation didn't help me?

What could I have done, but didn't, that would have made a big difference?

I don't mean this in the vague sense that you should give some general thought to your performance. I want you to literally ask and answer these three specific questions after every major test and paper you face as a high school student.

Next, use your answers to the first three questions to craft your response to this fourth and most important prompt: How am I going to prepare for the next test or paper?

This five-minute process will yield huge benefits for your studying techniques. Over time, your skills as a student will evolve to better match your unique personality and work demands. If you're jealous of those lucky students who seem to do very well without burning the midnight oil, you can be sure that they didn't stumble into a smarter way of studying; they probably evolved it, through trial and error, using a process like the one above. Follow their lead and never settle for your current flawed habits. If you're always improving, your work times will continue to plummet.