Those with children will no doubt be aware that the Summer holidays have recently begun and with it a swarm of excited children are out in the wild for six glorious weeks. At that age it seems as if the Summer will last forever, school a long forgotten bad memory.
Around August there will be uniform fittings and the sadness that the Summer adventures are now coming to an end. One of the ways that I was tempted back to school as a child was with a brand new set of stationary. The idea of the crisp new notebooks, the unblemished lesson planner and various highlighters was a reasonable reward for returning back to school with minimal fuss.
That first week my notes were always meticulous, everything neatly spaced and with handwriting that could have won awards if it were only submitted for review. Often, the painstaking time it took to write these notes, ensuring an array of different highlighters were used to mark extra important information led to me missing even more key information due to the focus on presentation rather than substance.
In my mid-twenties and embarking on my first professional qualification I found the same things to be true as when I was in school. I bought new stationary in order to treat myself for the study hours I would have to endure and then began to carefully take down notes from the learning management system. It took ages. Rather than focusing on the key information, I spent time writing down all the background information in neat cursive so that by the time I got to the real juicy material I had hand cramp and was ready for a break.
When you are studying part-time, alongside a full time job and a social life, every minute counts and so rather than focus on presentation or interesting but ultimately fruitless background information, it’s best to read as much as you can while taking notes down as you go. If something seems important? Write it down. It doesn’t matter if it’s chicken scratch at this stage as long as you are getting it down on paper.
An interesting article (well worth a full read) was posted over at College Info Geek, Tom Miller of WTF Professor emphasises the importance of getting things down rather than making them look presentable. It is his opinion that it is better to spend time reading as much as you can in a session and getting through the material while taking down useful notes quickly rather than making it look pretty and taking down every single bit of information. Tom explains:
“When you’re actively concentrating, your brain is in focused mode, and you’re concentrating on new material, forming new connections. Stay here for too long though, and you burn out on that new memory. The good news is, when you’re not actively concentrating and are relaxed or performing automatic, rote activities, your brain is in diffuse mode, and is working behind the scenes to sort through your new neural pathway you just carved out – forgetting the unimportant stuff, and re-formulating the key ideas into a useful framework.
By setting sessions in which to actively concentrate reading new course material and then following that up with a session in which to organise the notes you have taken into concepts and perhaps even reduce them down a little you will be giving your brain time to re-cooperate and ultimately take in the information more efficiently. It is this grouping of concepts that will help the information lodge its way into your brain and make reading later topics more accessible as you should already have a firm concept of earlier topics. Tom explains:
Each time you re-organize your notes, you’re doing the same thing in your brain. You’re reinforcing the important information into chunks, connecting it to your existing mental models. This makes the information faster to retrieve because you’ve packaged it more efficiently.
While Tom’s article is focused on physics lectures in a university, the same approach can be applied to distance learning for treasury. If you are spending an afternoon studying a few different topics, by spending time refining your notes down into chunks you are helping your brain make that connection making retaining the information easier. This way when it comes to exam time you should – hopefully – have one sheet of paper to revise from and those connections should already be clear in your brain, you’re just refreshing the pathways.
While the idea of a scruffy notebook does make me cringe, the idea of spending less time at my desk and maybe having time for a quick drink in a beer garden might help me move past it! With the weather being so lovely lately, it is important to maximise the time you spend studying so you can get out there and enjoy the rest of your day.
