How to Use Your Mind: A Psychology of Study: Being a Manual for the Use of Students and Teachers in the Administration of Supervised StudyKitson, Harry Dexter
Science
How to Use Your Mind: A Psychology of Study: Being a Manual for the Use of Students and Teachers in the Administration of Supervised Study
Kitson, Harry Dexter
Study skills
In entering upon a college course you are taking a step that may
completely revolutionize your life. You are facing new situations
vastly different from any you have previously met. They are also of
great variety, such as finding a place to eat and sleep, regulating
your own finances, inaugurating a new social life, forming new
friendships, and developing in body and mind. The problems connected
with mental development will engage your chief attention. You are now
going to use your mind more actively than ever before and should survey
some of the intellectual difficulties before plunging into the fight.
Perhaps the first difficulty you will encounter is the substitution of
the lecture for the class recitation to which you were accustomed in
high school. This substitution requires that you develop a new technic
of learning, for the mental processes involved in an oral recitation
are different from those used in listening to a lecture. The lecture
system implies that the lecturer has a fund of knowledge about a
certain field and has organized this knowledge in a form that is not
duplicated in the literature of the subject. The manner of
presentation, then, is unique and is the only means of securing the
knowledge in just that form. As soon as the words have left the mouth
of the lecturer they cease to be accessible to you. Such conditions
require a unique mental attitude and unique mental habits. You will be
obliged, in the first place, to maintain sustained attention over long
periods of time. The situation is not like that in reading, in which a
temporary lapse of attention may be remedied by turning back and
rereading. In listening to a lecture, you are obliged to catch the
words "on the fly." Accordingly you must develop new habits of paying
attention. You will also need to develop a new technic for memorizing,
especially for memorizing things heard. As a partial aid in this, and
also for purposes of organizing material received in lectures, you will
need to develop ability to take notes. This is a process with which you
have heretofore had little to do. It is a most important phase of
college life, however, and will repay earnest study.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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