Always Learning

4 More End-of-Year Study Tips

Leigh Pretnar Cousins, MS — Sat, 01 Jun 2013 13:06:33 +0000

Summer vacation will be here soon, but first you’ve got to get through exams!

Many students are in the thick of final exams right now and others have exams coming up in the next few weeks. Here are four more tips for final exams and school in general:

Study alone, then with pals. Don’t arrive at a group study session unprepared and clueless. Study alone first so you come equipped with a list of questions plus some knowledge to contribute.
Use your textbook. It’s likely your teacher gave you a study guide and hand-outs. And maybe you’ve hardly used that textbook all year. Use it now! Most textbooks have chapter summaries and review questions, and many of the newer texts provide online tests, quizzes and flashcards.
Go to the library. Bring your textbooks and notes, and leave your laptop at home and your cellphone in the car (you can take breaks to check for texts, but not more often than every half hour). Find a quiet table or study carrel and study without distraction. Once you adjust to the weirdness of not having your electronics available, you’ll likely be amazed at how much information you can absorb and how clear a lot of the subject matter now seems.
Study morning, noon and night. In the morning, do an overview of a subject by reading through the study guide, a few pages of notes, or a chapter summary. In the afternoon, tackle some hard concept or figure out a tough math procedure. In the evening, flip flash cards or quiz yourself (studying before bedtime takes advantage of sleep learning, in which the mind processes facts and stores important material in memory while you sleep).

Study smart, and hang in there!

[photo taken at LisSurMer, Cape Cod, MA, May 2013]

5 Tips to Minimize Final Exam Anxiety

Leigh Pretnar Cousins, MS — Sun, 26 May 2013 02:27:29 +0000

Final exams can be stressful, but here are some tips that can help make exam season go smoothly:

Get started now! Anxiety builds as you worry and do nothing. It may feel very difficult to get started, but you will feel immediate relief.
Begin reviewing now. You need not wait until teachers hand out review guides. Get out your old tests and quizzes and begin reworking them. (Don’t merely reread the questions and answers; you need to cover up your old answers and actually rework /rewrite each question on paper).
Do an overview. Use your notes and/or textbook to write a list of the topics you’ll need to know for each exam. Making this outline will give you a feeling of control and a realistic sense of the task ahead.
Tackle the easy stuff first. Brush up on the material you know pretty well and then cross it off your list. This will give you a sense of accomplishment and progress, which will lift your spirits.
Let parents do some of the pushing. During stressful times, structure and support from other people can be invaluable. Parents can help by firmly yet kindly making sure that studying is happening every day, by clearing the family calendar of as many non-academic events as possible, and by sometimes just sitting down and quietly keeping students company. It’s very reassuring to know that the people who love us have “got our backs” and are trying in big and small ways to help us succeed.

[photo of sailboat reconstructed inside Provincetown Library, Cape Cod, MA]

The Connection Between Attention, Memory and Learning

Leigh Pretnar Cousins, MS — Wed, 08 May 2013 14:27:31 +0000

My son, Matt, uses this simple trick to keep track of his cell phone: Whenever he puts it down, he taps it three times; the tapping focuses his attention just long enough for the location of his phone to register in his memory.

Meanwhile, I spend way too many frantic minutes searching for my phone, my calculator, my car keys, my gym bag…and bemoaning my “terrible memory.”

But problems such as misplacing items, making careless mistakes, etc, have their source not in faulty memory but in poor habits of attention. You can’t remember something if you never learned it in the first place!

This goes for academic learning as well. As life becomes more hectic and technology more intrusive, educators are noticing the effects on student attention, learning and memory. Students who multi-task in class or while doing their homework have more trouble understanding and remembering material than do kids who concentrate on just what they are studying.

I hope you’ll read Annie Murphy Paul’s excellent article, Why Learning and Multi-Tasking Don’t Mix, and then take a look at your own child’s homework routine. Are they juggling academics with texting. listening to music, checking Facebook, watching TV?…if so, you’ll want to help them set up a distraction-free study area and shut off all technology, so they can concentrate 100% on their academic work.

You may be pleasantly surprised at how many “learning problems” might clear up!

[photo of tile work, Guell Park, Barcelona]

For Students (And All of Us!) The First Priority Must Be Sleep

Leigh Pretnar Cousins, MS — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 14:51:43 +0000

In a Pentagon brainstorming session, Brigadier General Rhonda Cornum described her approach to life in one word: Prioritize.

You gotta love her method:

“A”
“B”
“C”
“Discard ‘C’”

(Martin Seligman’s wonderful book, Flourish, is full of these kinds of nuggets.)

Research keeps pouring out about the importance of sleep. Inadequate sleep is implicated in anxiety, depression, other emotional disorders, attention issues, unhealthy weight gain and poor cognition.

And sleep is essential to learning, because the material we learn during the day needs to be processed during sleep. All that studying is counter-productive if students are staying up too late to then “sleep on it” and let the information sink in.

This is the most hectic, fragmented, high-pressure time of the school year, and I know we all feel pulled in a million directions. But Mother Nature doesn’t care about all our ambitions; she still insists that the #1 Priority must be sleep.

Here are a few suggestions for making enough sleep happen:

Get homework done immediately upon arriving home. Don’t take a break first; just dive right in and plow through and save the break for evening.
Look for small bits of time during the day to get started on studying; even those two minutes before class begins can be used to begin reading an assignment, thinking about a paper topic, start a math problem (you need not finish it right then and there), etc.
No electronics in the bedroom. Keep them downstairs.
Set a bedtime that allows at least 8 hours of sleep (and really really really it ought to be 9+ hours for students), then reverse-engineer the day to make sleep the top priority. Some favorite activities simply will not fit into the daily schedule; save them for summer.
No glowing screens after 10 PM (or whatever is one hour before bedtime). The light from computers, TVs and smart phones disrupts sleep.
Review flash cards, vocab words, etc, before bed: You’ll wake up remembering them better!
Read something relaxing and/or boring in bed before you go to sleep.
Record your favorite shows and look forward to watching them this summer. DO NOT watch exciting TV shows right before bed!

Regards and pleasant dreams,
-Leigh

[photo of a ceiling in the palace at Versailles]

Making Friends with the SAT (or ACT)

Leigh Pretnar Cousins, MS — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 16:47:40 +0000

Did you ever have an honest yet tactless friend, a well-meaning pal who loudly points out the spinach in your teeth and eagerly agrees that Yup, those pants do make your rear end look huge?

The SAT (or ACT) is that sort of friend, a supplier of not-always-flattering truths. Those scores are a reality bite, and although many students are dismayed, I don’t think they are usually surprised.

I suggest that students view their SAT or ACT results as a wake-up call, a spotlight shining onto the skills they ought to finally get a handle on.

Too many students drag their weak academic areas around with them like a ball and chain, trying to ignore them, too frightened and confused to know how to fix them.

And most students experience an enormous sense of relief and empowerment when they improve in a skill that’s been holding them back.

So make NOW be the time you make a dent in that weak vocabulary…or improve those critical reading skills…or brush up those shaky math concepts.

One great thing about these standardized tests? Some focused work in a specific area, done consistently between now and the next test, can make a noticeable and satisfying difference. I suggest you select one or two areas you need to improve on and concentrate on those.

And, here are some great free resources you can take advantage of:

The SAT website gives some good information and tips on how to improve your scores, plus a free full-length online practice test.
Here’s a link to many good videos containing specific advice on how to handle many kinds of SAT and ACT questions.
Khan Academy has a ton of helpful test prep and math help videos and exercises.
I’ve created this simple calendar/checklist to help students stay on track with their daily SAT/ACT practice. Print a copy and hang it in a prominent location (refrigerator door, bathroom mirror, etc) so that family members will all look for those check marks and help reinforce daily practice.
Visit my website for other free resources and ideas.

[signs of spring: daffodils and college entrance exams]

The Right Way to do Math Homework (or Chemistry, Physics, Statistics, etc…)

Leigh Pretnar Cousins, MS — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 19:47:05 +0000

The reason math teachers assign homework is to give students the practice necessary for entrenching new concepts and skills in the brain.

Math homework is necessary for the same reason practicing the piano is necessary: it’s one thing to “get” what the teacher taught during the lesson, but it’s another thing to be able to perform that same skill independently and fluently.

Yet, all too many students practice math incorrectly, and they therefore gain little benefit, or even worse, they solidify misunderstandings and bad habits.

Practice doesn’t necessarily make perfect, but enough practice does make permanent, which is why guitar teachers, ski instructors, and golf pros are all such sticklers for proper form; they know how hard it is to unlearn errors that have become ingrained.

Many students will do a whole page of math and never check their answers. How do they know they were doing the right procedures? (Answer: They don’t.)

Or, students check their answers after completing the entire assignment, and only then discover that their answers don’t match up with those in the back of the book. In both such cases students tend to declare: Oh, well, the teacher will go over it in class tomorrow.

But in each of these scenarios, the student has now thoroughly practiced BEING WRONG.

Here’s the right way to do math (or math-related) homework:

Locate the answer key. If it’s in the back of the textbook, insert a bookmark or Post-it note for easy back-and-forth flipping.
Do the first problem.
Check it on the answer key.
If you were correct, move on to the next problem.
If you were incorrect, figure out what you did wrong before you move on.
Check your arithmetic; did you make a careless mistake?
If you realize you don’t understand how to do the problem, go to your notebook or your textbook and page through until you find the topic and carefully follow the explanation.
Still stumped? You can get help on www.KhanAcademy.org. Or, ask a friend or parent or sibling for help.
Only as a last resort, put a star next to the problem and make sure and ask the teacher for help tomorrow.
Proceed to the next problem.

Remember, the reason for doing math homework is to train your brain into automatically performing the CORRECT procedures. This is why you need to check after every problem and make sure your thinking is on target, and, if you are off-track, to fix your misunderstandings right away.

In fact, it’s beneficial to make mistakes and learn from them. Research shows that when lessons are too easy, students don’t learn them very well!

Believe it or not, thinking hard and even battling with confusion will make you smarter in the end. These experiences may not feel good, but they’re good for your brain. (So many sports and music skills are also like this, such as learning to swing a bat properly or bow a violin correctly; tedious yet vital!)

And the last step in math homework should always be spiral review. This means going back and practicing a problem or two of older material from the night before, the week before, or the semester before. Math is cumulative, which means those older skills are always important and need to be kept honed.

Of course this method of doing math homework is more time-consuming and effortful up front, but students who follow this plan will then be thrilled to find that they hardly need to study for tests; they know the material already and feel prepared and confident.

Like so many things, doing math homework the right way is a pain at first, but developing this habit will have a huge payoff!

[sculpture on lawn at Tulane University]

Follow Along with My SAT Class for Free

Leigh Pretnar Cousins, MS — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 00:46:53 +0000

I’ve been teaching an SAT preparation class at one of my local community colleges.

It’s my third time teaching this class, and I’m finally feeling like I’m getting the curriculum shaped into a form I like a lot.

I’m trying to create something more than just an SAT class: I blend in research-based study tips, plus I’m trying to get my students embarked on some good habits that they’ll need to succeed in college and in life:

Studying with focus (which includes doing without cellphone and music)
Studying consistently, over time (not cramming the day before the test)
Keeping a Study Journal so as to plan, track progress, and stay motivated
Practicing by writing (annotating, working math problems on paper) not by just looking over one’s notes (a very ineffective method)
Quizzing and testing oneself as a study method, as well as to assess progress (good old-fashioned flash cards are a great learning method, because the brain learns best with quizzing and repetition).

After each class, I’ve been posting on my website my outline, notes and assignments.

I’ve also inserted links to many useful and free online videos, worksheets and interactive practice. My students use these posts for review or to catch up if they miss a class, and…

Anyone who wants to follow along at home each week is welcome to access all of these materials and use them as a FREE do-it-yourself SAT prep class!

We’ve had two classes so far (there will be six in all):

Session One (January 26)

Session Two (February 2)

I will post notes for the remaining classes after I teach them, on the following dates: Feb 9, 16, 23 and March 2. Just go to my website, www.LeighCousins.com, click on the “Tests” page, and visit the purple box.

A student who follows my notes and does the work ought to be well-prepared for the March 9 SAT or any other SAT this year. (Make sure and register soon for the March 9 exam!)

It would thrill me to have any or all of you take advantage of this resource, and by all means spread the word to friends, family, or groups who might benefit, including home schoolers, youth groups, etc.

I welcome your feedback and suggestions!

[photo of sculpture on Yale campus]

Say YOW! to Slow and Steady Learning in 2013

Leigh Pretnar Cousins, MS — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 18:38:41 +0000

The human brain is built for learning, even though learning is often not a cake walk.

Ever since our trip to Iceland in July I’ve been enamored of all things Icelandic, including the language.

Every Icelander we met spoke lilting, perfect English to us, and then chattered to one another in a jaunty Nordic blur punctuated by frequent smiles and exclamations of Yow!

These emphatic Yow!’s felt so delightfully cheerful and positive, and it turns out that “Yow” (properly spelled “Ja”) means Yes.

Our favorite tour guide was a college student in his early 20′s. Chiseled, blond, and surely a direct descendant of Leif Erickson, Tucker turned out instead to be a skateboarder dude from Wisconsin.

Tucker had discovered that the University of Iceland provides free tuition, room, board and health care to any student, regardless of citizenship, just so long as they speak Icelandic; he grabbed a self-study language course and hunkered down to practice every day…and, two years later, here he was! Yow!

My main point is this: Resolve to find something you want to learn or get better at, or help your student select something, and set aside a regular time every day to practice for about 15 or 20 minutes. Stick with it for one month, and then glory in the improvement!

The brain is amazingly “plastic,” and even if it’s not “good at” some subject, if you work at it little by little, consistently, learning will happen!

But what if you, or your student, just haaaaates some subject?…and therefore avoids it like the plague? All the more reason to chip away at it, little by little. Research shows that liking increases with expertise, and with familiarity.

I love Pamela Druckerman’s book, Bringing Up Bebe, which is all about “the wisdom of French parenting.” How, for example, do the French raise their kids to love every kind of food (escargots! leeks! blue cheese!) while American kids refuse to eat anything but pizza?

She describes the little-by-little process the French use to slowly educate their kids’ taste buds and learn to love a wide range of foods:

My American baby books recognize that certain foods are an acquired taste. They say that if a baby rejects a food, parents should wait a few days and then offer the same food again. My Anglophone friends and I all do this. But we assume that if it doesn’t work after a few tries, our babies just don’t like avocado, sweet potatoes, or spinach.

In France, the same advice to keep reproposing foods to babies is elevated to a mission. Parents take for granted that, while kids will prefer certain tastes over others, the flavor of each vegetable is inherently rich and interesting, Parents see it as their job to bring the child around to appreciating this. They believe that just as they must teach the child how to sleep, how to wait, and how to say bonjour, they must teach her how to eat.

No one suggests that introducing all these foods will be easy. The French government’s free handbook on feeding kids says all babies are different. “Some are happy to discover new foods. Others are less excited, and diversification takes a little bit longer.” But the handbook urges parents to be dogged about introducing kids to, new foods and not giving up even after a child has rejected a food three or more times.

Druckerman goes on to describe how the very same approach works on finicky adults.

And please think about how this same slow, consistent, patient process could be applied to any number of changes you might want to make in your own life and/or guide and support your child to make.

One place to start might be with The Vocabulary.com Top 1000:

The top 1,000 vocabulary words have been carefully chosen to represent difficult but common words that appear in everyday academic and business writing. These words are also the most likely to appear on the SAT, ACT, GRE, and ToEFL. To create this list, we started with the words that give our users the most trouble and then ranked them by how frequently they appear in our corpus of billions of words from edited sources. If you only have time to study one list of words, this is the list.

Go to vocabulary.com, create an account (it’s free), and then practice for 15 minutes per day. The site tracks your progress, so you can see your improvement.

Or, maybe you should get your child started on learning Icelandic; free college tuition! Ja!

12 Days of Happiness

Leigh Pretnar Cousins, MS — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 20:19:31 +0000

Happy Holidays, Everyone!

I purposely waited until December 26 to make this post, figuring that this week between Christmas and New Years might be the perfect time to present my little gift to you.

I love TED talks; I watch them often, I show them in my classes, and I routinely share them with loved ones and students.

There are a number of TED talks that have, without exaggeration, profoundly and permanently changed my own life for the better.

Several have demystified aspects of my own mind and emotions, thus helping me feel more confident, serene and happy. Others have provided perspective on cultural forces which shape and form our lives in ways that are usually invisible to us, the knowledge of which I found to be deeply empowering.

I’ve selected twelve of my favorite TED talks, each addressing aspects of happiness, emotional health and well-being, and I’ve assembled them in what feels to me like a user-friendly order, beginning with one that will literally change your life in two minutes flat!

My fondest hope is that you will check out at least a few of these talks. They contain real science in comprehensible form, real knowledge about how our minds work that can be applied to your own life, right now.

Guaranteed, you will find fresh perspectives, answers to important questions, and a bunch of practical life hacks perfect for incorporating into your New Year’s resolutions.

Twelve Days of Happiness

Wishing you a happy, healthy and serene 2013! -Leigh Pretnar Cousins

[photo of the ceiling in the Sagrada Familia, Barcelona]

I’ve Told My Kid 1000 Times!!!

Leigh Pretnar Cousins, MS — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 17:41:22 +0000

Why don’t kids take our good advice? Why don’t they do the things we suggest, things that would obviously help them?

Why don’t they listen to us?

Along with academic tutoring and test preparation, I teach study skills: how to study for a biology test, how to write a term paper, how to learn vocabulary words.

Parents are eager for these lessons, and also jaded.

He knows this stuff already.
Her teachers repeated this over and over all last year.
I’ve already told him a thousand times!!!

Any kind of personal change is difficult. Old habits are hard to break and new habits take, on average, a month or more of consistent practice before they stick.

It’s especially hard to change behaviors which were learned as protections against emotional discomfort. Kids (and all of us!) develop reflexive habits of “carelessness” or “forgetting.” We all tend to “forget” about doing activities that are bound to showcase our weak spots and tweak our pride.

And so much of schoolwork is like this! It seems a cruel irony, that the very subjects a student “is bad at,” are the subjects she most needs to focus on and practice more diligently.

When teaching study skills, I don’t just explain the skills, because the student will tend to listen but then not change his behaviors. So, I also look for ways to make sure the student uses and practices new skills and creates new habits.

When forming habits, it’s very helpful to incorporate Visible Results and Accountability. Here are some of the strategies I use with my students:

Keeping an assignment calendar posted in a highly visible place (bedroom door, refrigerator, bathroom mirror, etc), and using brightly colored markers to check off finished assignments.
Finding a responsible friend and report to one another every day.
Being accountable to a parent.
Being accountable to me, by requiring the student to e-mail me every evening after she’s done her homework.

I always offer lots of encouragement and support, and I avoid dishing out criticism (I do correct errors, but always in a gentle and positive way).

Often it seems as if kids “should be more independent,” “should be able to figure these things out on their own.” Parents wonder at how the very same kid who can strategise and master a complex video game can’t seem to get organized to do his research paper or plan ahead to get math help before the big test.

Dr. John Gottman tells us that when anxiety rises, higher level thinking skills shut down. People become less capable of planning, organizing, and processing what they hear, especially if what is said is delivered in a harsh, insulting, or impatient manner.

And Dr. Brene Brown reminds us that shaming another person does not produce lasting change in their behavior; it merely makes that person recoil in self-protective pain and tune out even more completely.

This means that when kids (and all people!) are trying to accomplish difficult, ego-threatening change, they need a LOT of hand-holding and patient repetition.

Telling a kid a thousand times won’t change his behavior.

Assisting him to do the behavior over and over, even if it’s a thousand times!…while offering consistent, patient support and encouragement…is what will eventually turn the behavior into a permanent habit.

[One Step at a Time; photos from our summer hike in geothermal Iceland]