“Cramming is not a practice.  It’s an exercise in panic.”

     ~  Debra Gwartney

I hate to speak ill of a practice exercise with such a long and noble history, but a blogger’s got to do what a blogger’s got to do, even if the aforementioned blogger, when reflecting upon his own undergraduate practice experience re: cramming, now stands before you as nothing more (or less) than a big old hypocrite.

So let’s get that bit of academic confession out of the way, shall we?

Long ago, in a galaxy far away (a few decades, about 13 miles to the north) yours truly found himself in the kind of introductory Psych course that (so help me) could bore the paint right off the walls. Our prof was an amiable old guy who, for some inexplicable reason, genuinely liked us.  Who knows why?  We were far too many, and most were aggressively disinterested in a course that simply filled a requirement.  He seemed about as happy with the department’s mandatory attendance policy as we were, and he made it quite clear to anyone who cared to listen that he would much rather not take roll and just talk about interesting Psych stuff with the few people who were actually interested enough to show up and talk about the interesting Psych stuff.

The course materials, in those Dark Days before PowerPoint, consisted of an overpriced edition of a textbook (required) and a separate study guide (recommended).  Let me say for the record that I misread the syllabus and bought the study guide by accident.

It turned out the prof took his exam questions verbatim from the study guide.  He changed the order of the A, B, C, D answers, as well as the order of the questions, but that was it.  People still failed the course.  Seriously.  Even after I shared what was going on.

My strategy for this course was to get up early the day of the exam, figure out the study guide answers, cram my short term memory, take the test in the afternoon, and then promptly forget the morning’s work about 12 minutes after handing in the exam.

Anyway, I aced the exams, aced the course, and got over any lingering guilt rather quickly.  Happy ending, right?

Meh.

The next semester I tried the same thing with Chemistry:  got up early, cracked open the study guide – and promptly realized I made a HUGE miscalculation.  I couldn’t get through all the material, let alone know it.  My grade proved that.  (Total transparency:  that grade was a 23).  The Chem cram approach died instantaneously.

Anyway, did I learn anything?  Certainly not about Chemistry, even though I passed the course, in large part because I could drop that 23.  And anything I eventually learned about Psychology came from courses I took later.  But I can pass on this observation:

Cramming only works until it doesn’t work anymore.

Staff Writer: Pete Kimchuk, Senior Learning Specialist

“The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring.”

                                                                                                                           ~  Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler, the author who gave us The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye and Farewell, My Lovely, as well as generously providing the epigram for today’s blog post, died way back in 1959.  He had good reason to bemoan the “flood of print”.  During his career paperbacks became cheaper and easier to produce, to say nothing of large circulation magazines and daily newspapers, many of which published multiple daily editions. So while Old Ray didn’t live long enough to witness the mad proliferation of text brought to us courtesy of the world wide web, there was certainly a greater availability of potential reading material.

In the land of academic reading the idea that a student will savor what’s been assigned seems beside the point. When confronted with hundreds of pages of required reading, the first urge is just to power through, roll the eyeballs over line after line of words, words, words until this nightmare is over. Because that’s what we’re supposed to do, right?  Complete the assignment, finish the book, read the PDFs.  Move on.

Savoring, in Chandler’s parlance, here is akin to processing, to thinking deeply, which is after all what we’re supposed to be doing anyway.  I’m not saying that we can do that with every assigned page of text, but I am saying that we should at least pick out chunks that resonate with us as readers and we should reread these bits, and think about what these passages mean not just in the context of the class material, but beyond.

On the other side we should acknowledge the dilemma of those tasked with building the reading list and the syllabus. This requires more than anything else to strike a balance between breadth and depth. Deciding what should be skimmed and what to read deeply is as much art as science, even for those who assign the work.

This is an old tension, maybe even an ancient one. Did the sages of Sumer worry that the unprecedented availability of cuneiform tablets made it more difficult to appreciate what had been pressed into the soft clay with a stylus?  Sure.  Let’s go with that.

Staff Writer: Pete Kimchuk

“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”

                                                                                                                                              ~  Albert Einstein

Welcome to the next stage of your education.

Over the last couple weeks, chances are you’ve probably noticed that a few things are different. You probably noticed that you feel different– and not necessarily in good ways.  Let’s take a gander, why don’t we, at one of the more insidious.

You may have noticed what can best be described as a creeping insecurity.  This probably happened when, in a flash of self-awareness, you realized that all you know is how much you don’t know.  You sense it when you’re reading, you feel it during class discussion, you wrestle with it in the middle of the night when you can’t get to sleep because how can you possibly sleep when there’s so much you don’t know that you should know, and you should have made yourself somehow know all that stuff years ago before you got to the point where all these people you don’t even know are going to know precisely how much you don’t know.

Sound familiar?

First, take a deep breath.

What you’re experiencing is known as imposter syndrome.  There is some debate as to whether you were issued it when you got your PennCard, or if you picked it up during orientation.  In any event, rest assured, you are not alone.

Consider:  Your learning curve is steepest at the start of a program, even if you have an undergrad’s background in the discipline.  This may strike you as even more dispiriting, but just take it as a simple sign of the depth you’ll be required to go to in your graduate work.  There’s no need to turn practical self-evaluation into personal self-flagellation.

Many people wind up in graduate school because somewhere along the line they got really good at school.  They learned how to learn.  School became an arena of success.  This doesn’t make them immune to imposter syndrome.  Other people wind up in grad and professional programs because they see no alternative if they hope to continue along a particular career trajectory.  Among these folks you’ll find people who may not believe that they were ever good at school, but they know they have to suck it up and do what they have to do, which means going back to school, a place where they feel they don’t belong.   If you fall into this category, you’re more than likely experiencing imposter syndrome with a particularly nasty bite.  But you can always learn to learn better.

As I always say, you know where to find us.

Staff Writer: Pete Kimchuk, Senior Learning Instructor

“All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.”

     ~  Sun Tzu

Confession:  I’ve never been crazy about the word “tips” when it comes to how to study, or do better on exams, or do everything you said you would do before you realized that you over-committed.

I used to think that it was because “tips” sounds lightweight, a feathery and effortless little nothing that removes stains from your fine woolens, or helps you pick up a few bucks at the race track.  Tips can be bad, too, like when someone leaves you $0.23 on a $54 check.

But aren’t we a learning center?  Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do?  Aren’t we supposed to provide handy dandy “tips” and then, by the power vested in us by the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, these “tips” become “spells” and then everyone goes home happy, except for Draco Malfoy, because “duh”?

Rest assured that my initial bad reaction to the word “tips” really has nothing to do with the earnest young witch or wizard student who comes to our humble little shop looking for help and/or advice.  What gets me about the word “tips” is the underlying thought that better learning involves nothing more than grabbing a few random bon mots before skipping off to a 3.87 gpa.

Anyway, I’ve mellowed.

What we do here at your learning center is help you tackle your academic challenges through self-evaluation and refining your learning process, followed by further self-evaluation and tweaking of the process. You know:  lather, rinse, repeat.

What I’m saying is, if you’re looking for a few tips, come on in. We’re delighted to go through how it is you’re going about doing your academic stuff. Just don’t be surprised if you start to see that this learning how to learn thing is deeper than you expected.

Pete Kimchuk, Senior Learning Instructor

“If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not working on hard enough problems. And that’s a big mistake.”
~ Frank Wilczek, 2004 Nobel Prize winner in physics

My Weingarten colleague, Rashmi Kumar, knowing my deep affection for epigrams, aphorisms and anything even remotely quotable, gave me this one while we were prepping for a STEM related workshop. Good one, isn’t it?

Wilczek won his Nobel Prize (along with David Gross and H. David Politzer) for his discovery of asymptotic freedom, which deals with the distance between quarks and the effect on strong interaction. If you’re looking for a better explanation and you’re not rooming with Sheldon Cooper, you can read this instead [SPOILER ALERT: the closer the quarks, the less the strong interaction.]

But back to the quote. I like this one because, for me, it encapsulates a useful piece of metacognitive wisdom: you can learn more from getting something wrong than by getting it right. To put a finer point on it, you deepen your understanding by searching out why something is wrong, why you can’t see it, and along the way maybe discover whatever blind spot in the mind’s eye that prevents you from seeing everything whole. It’s a wondrous moment when you finally see why some particular something or other is a mistake, and that feeling of exhilaration can last you quite a while, right up until the next mistake, usually on the very next problem. But it’s best not to dwell on that. Making mistakes is not just a part of any successful process, but the inextricable part.

On a more pragmatic level, the quote also implies a strategic realization: plug and chug gets you only so far. All those formulas and equations and numbers mean something, and if you’re not actively looking for the deeper meaning and the bigger picture, you’ll never find it.

Staff Blogger: Pete Kimchuk, Senior Learning Instructor

Ah… fall semester. If you’ve lived most of your life on the academic calendar year, like I have, you probably think of the new year as beginning in September. (Okay fine, August, but I find it best not to dwell on such unpleasantness, thank you very much.) In any case, this time of year always feels like new beginnings, an opportunity to do better, think deeper, become a better person. And I’m not alone. We all want to do so much. Students, faculty, administrators, humble blogging learning instructors, we all want to not only accomplish that certain something, but a whole bunch of other things, too. If there’s such a thing as a Penn gene, that’s it, and we all got it.

It’s no secret that here at your learning center, we get lots of early fall students who want to do ALL THE THINGS. So the worry grows: do I have enough time?

Let’s take a moment and consider the Basic Math of Undergraduate Time.

There are 168 hours in the week, and (theoretically) you are asleep for a third of them, leaving 112 hours. A 5cu load should, when accounting for class time, recitations and class-related tasks (you know, all that readin’ and writin’ and figurin’) you’re looking at a 45 hour commitment, leaving 67 hours for non academic stuff. So far, so good. Figure that the average meal should take about 20 minutes to consume and you’re left with 60 hours. Are you an athlete? Even after your 20 hour weekly commitment to the team, you still have 40 hours left. So, yeah, quantitatively speaking, you have plenty of time.

But these are just raw numbers, and when it comes to managing time, raw numbers are only part of the challenge.

But that’s a different post.

 

Staff Blogger: Pete Kimchuk, Senior Learning Instructor