#pre-reading

Pros:

Makes you retain the information better (hopefully). If something was difficult to grasp, you’ll retain it a little better.

Cons:

Take time, and possibly costs you some frustration, because you don’t get it or are spending an inordinate amount of time on it.

Well, should you review about as fast as you can learn? Probably not. It’s just review. So, don’t spend an hour per class per day reviewing. Now, what if you happen to have a particularly easy class -- you don’t really need to review at all for that one? Then your reviewing should be limited that day to say, 5 minutes. In order to figure out if you need to review the material at all, skim it for 5 min.

Just as with pre-reading, I think a lot of the use of reviewing will be a focus on the hard stuff. You’ll want to spend time on that, and ignore/skim things that are easy.

Take note, some things you don’t need to spend time reviewing, even if you don’t understand right away. Sometimes, you’ll grasp the information by doing the homework. Other times, you really feel quite lost and you don’t know that you understand anything. I think for the times when you feel very lost, you should make a mental note to come back to this and work through it, spending 20 or more minutes on the thing you don’t get.

Just as with pre-reading, I think 15 minutes per lecture is plenty. If you need more, ‘schedule’ that time.

Should you take notes when reviewing? I had a thought. I think I’d like to try adding scribbles to my own notes in pencil or green pen (which is easy to ignore), lilttle explanations that would help me along when it comes to take the test. Else, during my review, I’d circle the things I didn’t understand, and mark them as “do the HW” or “look this up asap”.

Another effective technique is to explain to myself something.

In all, this is what I’m going to try in Sept:

For each lecture - spend max 20 min. First 5, skim your notes. Make little green-pen notes or questions if you need. Identify something you want to explain to yourself, or something you totally don’t get and need to work on. Last 15, work on that thing.