First day of lessons for this academic year – it's been a tiring day, but I'm really glad to be back! This semester will mostly be focused on Russian, save for one hour of English Linguistics a week, focusing on Pragmatics. I'm also particularly happy with how my notes are turning out – I'm using an old 2020 planner flipped upside down, as the paper is too good to just throw away.
Okay so call me a forgetful dork but I took notes while studying for the math section of the SAT with Khan Academy yesterday
Shoutout to @aredhel-of-gondolin for helping me study! If you tend to get distracted easily, I would recommend asking a friend to review with you. Personally, I feel a lot more focused when I study with other people, even if they’re watching tv and talking to me about it while I do work.
I used GoodNotes 5 to make these while I was studying. I love how Khan Academy tracks what you need to study more and gives you both videos to teach you and practice problems to make sure you understand. Sometimes, Sal’s way of teaching gets a bit confusing for me, so what I like to do is pause the video after he introduces the question and write down the important information. Then, if I understand it well enough at that point, I go ahead and try to solve it. If I get stuck or don’t know where to go, I play the video and stop right after he explains what I’ve been confused on. Then, I see if we got the same answer. If my answer is wrong, I go back and follow along to see where I got something wrong and try again from there.
I find that using a specific color to highlight important information/answers helps me remember it better when I’m reviewing! I thought this shade of blue was really cute as a preset highlighter but it didn’t have a matching pen color, so I went to “custom” and put in the same HEX code as the highlighter.
To give the titles a bit of a pop, I wrote them in black, selected and copied the text, pasted it at a slight angle from the original text, and changed the font to my highlighting color. This gives it a bit of a shadow effect and makes it really eye-catching. If you want to use white, go for it!
When you take notes to reference later, make sure you include all necessary information that helps your end result make sense. If you don’t know why your answer was wrong, always go back to the original question and make sure you’re answering exactly what the question asked.
Remember that your notes are for you. Don’t be afraid to write important information you might forget and need help remembering in the margins! I know I definitely did for a few of those pages.
Studying is so unnecessarily hated, so can just appreciate the sheer aesthetic of studying?
Waking up early and drinking green tea with textbooks on your lap as light spills in through the open windows. Laying out post-its and notebooks and coloured pens as you begin to write colour coordinated notes for each subject. Having textbooks and notebooks spread out all over your desk with your laptop in the center, as you make powerpoint presentations for each chapter. The feeling of scribbling down formulae that you pin up all over your walls, creating a colourful display of knowledge in your room. Having a binder filled to the brim with detailed diagrams with annotations and post-its all over them.
And if you’re chaotic and messy and disorganised? That’s equally aesthetic!
Having pinned your hair up in a messy bun as you sit on the floor, surrounded by open binders that have pages upon pages of notes spilling out of them. Sticking your pencil through that bun because you can’t find your rubber band and then cursing two minutes later because where is my pencil it was right here. Piles of used coffee cups and plates from the hundreds of different snacks that have just piled up in your room. Messy diagrams sellotaped to the bookshelves because you can’t find any of your notebooks. Random pieces of information scribbled on the cuff of your jeans because there’s no more space on your arms and you can’t find a spare bit of paper. That one page of notes that you made that was actually informative and organised before it trailed off into three pages of doodles.
Studying is aesthetic. And the aesthetic of studying is a fucking great motivator to start doing it.
My intermediate microeconomics prof is an angel, his lectures and presentations are so clear and detailed I don't even need to think about following other materials for making my notes (well, not much anyway).
I also brushed up a little on my mathematical methods in economics paper, frankly I don't even know what the entire syllabus is 😂 Hoping to find out today.
Glued some cute characters on my notebooks! I start my classes on the 13th :') honestly, not super thrilled. I've been enjoying reading and doing my own thing over my break. But I'll make the most of it!
Also read Ace by Angela Chen and fell in love with it. It covers so much - sexual stereotypes, consent and rape, romantic relationships and sexual ones, what asexuality is and isn't, sex and feminism - i could go on and on and on. Well worth the read.
Did some sociology notea today! Learning some really interesting stuff right now (basically the First World are trash - we knew). Read some more of Giovanni's Room, I'm really glad I'm reading it slowly bc I feel like I'm enjoying the slowburn.
