I was listening to the radio the other day, and the subject was the dislocation recently experienced by a lot of students due to the COVID pandemic. Many had obviously experienced a lot of stress over their educational endeavors, especially in regard to the taking of tests and exams. That got me to thinking about my own checkered academic career and how “improbable” it all was. I had NO BUSINESS being in college, much less in law school but, somehow, I wound up with a doctorate in law and practiced law for 38 years! That is so absurd, it almost cracks me up to say that! I was a terrible student and spent way more time and effort agonizing over how to get OUT of those chores than just going ahead and doing them. I was also really focused by the distractions of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll!
All I ever WANTED to be was an automobile mechanic. I was car-crazy when I was in high school and, even though I was pretty savvy about math and science, I wanted NOTHING to do with languages, English or history! Ugh! Getting my drivers license right after my 16th birthday was about the greatest thing that ever happened to me! Party on, Garth!
After a year of teaching math and science in a private elementary school, I went to law school, but my academic habits had not improved. I fell out of favor and flunked out (literally) at the end of my first year. I had no clue what to do. But, again ironically, the only black student in my class had also flunked out, as well as the president of our class! So, to keep the school “integrated,” they offered the black student a wonderful deal and, of course, had to extend the same to the other two of us who surely did not deserve it: we could repeat our first year, AT NO CHARGE, and then the two years’ grades would be averaged, and on the basis of that outcome, they would decide whether or not to re-admit us to the school!
So, I managed to matriculate after that,, graduated AND passed the bar exam on my first try, but I always have to admit that it took me four years to complete what most accomplish in three years. I was “special-ed” in law school! This spoiled, elitist, utterly undeserving white boy is, truly, the beneficiary of race-based “Affirmative Action”! It doesn’t get more ironic than that!
Toward the end of law school, I began to get a glimmer of what I had been doing wrong in my study practices, but I still wasn’t paying much attention. It came home more strongly after graduation in 1973 when I was in an intense two-week “cram” course just prior to the bar exam. We met in two four-hour periods every day (except Sundays) for 12 days, then took the exam right after. I was determined to do the best I could do so that I would not have to re-take that fearsome exam! I really WANTED to pass! Thankfully, the exam was pretty “cold”; the cram course had done a good job of spotting the likely questions. But, I had taken a LOT of notes—over two notebooks-full, on both sides of the page, and though I hadn’t really thought about it, I had taken notes that were my own contemplative SUMMARY of what the lecturer had said, rather than trying to write down everything he said, verbatim. So when I studied my notes the Sunday prior to the exam, I was reading my own understanding of the material rather than the lecturer’s understanding of the material. It worked. I became a lawyer, unleashed upon the unsuspecting world!
I started practicing law in a rural town but still thought about car mechanics. I acquired a couple of older cars, fixed them up, and enjoyed driving them around. I would do a lot of my own work, but I realized I really did not know diddly-squat about car mechanics. So, at age 56 in 2003, I decided to take a couple of auto-mechanics courses at the nearby community college! I did pretty good—I got an “A” and a “B,” so I decided to take a couple more courses, and I got “A”s in both! But what was interesting is that I had decided to sit up front, right under the instructor’s nose (for a change), pay attention to his lectures, ask a lot of pesky questions, frequently argue with the instructor and, when he paused to catch a breath, I would write down in my notebook my OWN impressions of what he’d said! In prior academic endeavors, I had often sat in the back of the classroom and daydreamed. It was a costly mistake. This time it was different and, thankfully, I was totally aware of the difference.
It began to pay off, so I took more courses over the next couple of years and EVENTUALLY formally matriculated as a student in the program. I had chosen to follow a “certificate” program instead of the associate degree program. It required fewer general academic courses (which I didn’t care about) and was more focused. At age 59 I completed the program and was awarded my certificate in auto mechanics, summa cum laude! I had a straight-A average but for that one damned “B” my first year, having missed the “A” by just one question on that course’s final exam! The “honors” designation was almost ludicrous, but I really had earned it. I wasn’t the best mechanic in the program by far; many of the younger guys were far more facile than I, but I knew what I was doing.
I had also figured out how to take those “standardized” tests that are often horribly misused to evaluate the intellectual fitness of individuals, rather than evaluating the overall status of the group being tested. Too many people are fixated on how INDIVIDUALS perform on those tests, and that is flat WRONG! Those tests don’t tell us diddly about particular individuals. We all have different abilities and aptitudes!
Even though we students had been told (1) answer as many questions as possible, and (2) “wrong” answers don’t count, the “educational” establishment seemed to enjoy keeping the real secrets of those tests from us students, so many of us wandered in the SAT wilderness, never really mastering the fairly straightforward tricks needed to beat those tests, because nobody simply EXPLAINED them to us!
I managed to go from a middling 87th Percentile on my SAT’s up to the 98th or 99th Percentile (the highest possible) on other tests I later took over the years by simply employing the main strategy that I finally figured out on my own: do NOT spend more than 15 seconds on any one question! If you can’t answer the question IMMEDIATELY, mark it and move on to the next question! WHY? Because, there are also easy questions at the end, and since one’s score depends on the TOTAL number of “correct” answers, one may as well get to those easy answers further on down the road! It is THAT simple! If one gets bogged down struggling to conquer a particular question (as I used to do), the clock is ticking, and “TIME” may be called before one can even get to the end the first time!
Besides, an “easy” question addressed later may give a particular insight on how to answer an earlier question that was blocked! One should just keep rolling over and over the test, from beginning to end, answering as many questions as possible. SPEED is the key! No one will care about your earnest, futile struggle along the way!
Anyway, I have been both a teacher (real estate law) in the community-college system and also a student. (Additionally, I had taken a course in computer machine-code programming some years ago.) I am sorry I wasted so many years (and student space) in college and law school, undeserving of those opportunities, but I am glad that I FINALLY came to realize that the key (for me, anyway) to learning well is as follows:
FIRST—FORGET the damned grades! One is in school to LEARN, not to rack up points. If one LEARNS the material, the grades WILL take care of themselves. If you don’t care about learning, get the Hell out of the way! NOW!
SECOND—Sit up front and PAY ATTENTION! The back of the classroom is the zone of pathetic failure! One needs to hear EVERY WORD distinctly. Besides, you may wish to take issue on some point with the instructor/teacher, and you can’t do that while daydreaming and looking out the window.
THIRD—Don’t take notes while the instructor/teacher is talking! Just sit there and listen! Pay attention! And just think about what you are hearing! Wait until (s)he stops to catch a breath or a thought, then scribble down YOUR OWN THOUGHTS about what you’ve just heard. You will appreciate that later.
FOURTH—Ask LOTS of questions. If you don’t understand something, you can’t learn it! Asking questions also forces one to mentally frame the material in relevant fashion, and that is part of the learning process. And, don’t give a damn about what the others think of your “stupid” brown-nosing questions. They won’t be taking the exam for you nor suffering the bad grades you’ll EARN for not bothering to understand the material!
FIFTH—It may be necessary to actually MEMORIZE certain things. A lot of criticism has been understandably leveled at rote memorization in the public schools, but sometimes memorization is simply necessary. I was flunking the course in Automatic Transmissions and I knew it, simply because I did not understand the complexities. The automatic transmission is the single most complicated device on a car. I was fascinated by them and always wanted to learn how they worked. But, I was flunking.
Somehow I had realized I had to memorize the operational “logic table” for the planetary gearset, the 400+ year-old core component of most automatic transmissions. That gearset has three basic elements: (1) the “sun” gear; (2) the ring gear; and (3) the 3 or 4 “planetaries” nestled inbetween with their connecting “carrier.” Automatic transmissions variously grab, hold and release (via high-pressure hydraulic valves) those individual components to achieve their amazing function. There is just no other way to understand it but to memorize it. I did so and got my “A” in the course.
SIXTH—Read the book! Not because it’s inerrant, but precisely because it may well be WRONG about something, and your developing superior knowledge of the material may allow you to see that error and point it out, to the shock and envy of the whole class, including the teacher/instructor! If one reads the book, it can also form the foundation for what will likely be heard in the classroom, and the “context” may become clearer.
FINALLY—“All-nighters” may become a thing of the past. One may actually get some much-needed sleep before the final exams, since a glance through one’s pre-digested notes (see THIRD) only once may be all that is necessary to become re-acquainted with the thoughts one should have ALREADY had about the material at the time it was presented! That is why one should sit up front in class, pay attention, just listen to the lectures and engage in dialogue with the instructor/teacher, leaving note-taking for later to summarize one’s OWN thoughts about the material. That should enable learning the material the first time, rather than trying to cram utterly inscrutable stuff into one’s head the night before the exam!
Take it from this academically “challenged” yokel: you may be pleasantly surprised at the results!
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