Study Calculus

There’s still an hour or so before dinner. You decide to get some work done, given that it’s piling up. When is it not? You head to the library, finding an isolated desk, and you put on your headphones, pulling up a playlist of some new releases that you’ve been meaning to check out.

With the week’s latest tunes blasting into your ears, you start reviewing the notes that you’ve been making over the past semester. Consolidating material is just as important as learning new things, and besides, you spend so much time going over your previous notes when solving problem sets that you might as well make sure you have your stuff down pat first.

It takes you about half an hour to thoroughly go through your notes from last week, but by the time you’ve finished, you feel much more comfortable with the concepts and proof techniques involved. Now you’re ready to tackle the homework.

The first problem that you work on turns out to just be a minor extension on something that you covered in class. Having reviewed the material, the answer immediately hits you, and it takes only a couple minutes to write it up. Onto the next one. The next problem is thornier. You close your eyes, listening to the music, letting the problem sit in your head for a second. This one’s not going to be easy. But you see the rough idea of what you need to do. You put pen to paper, sketching out an outline of the steps that you’d need to complete the problem, and all of a sudden, it looks pretty doable. You crunch through the problem, completing each of the steps that you laid out in turn, and by the end of the hour, you’ve come up with a solution that you’re happy with.

Time well spent, you think, especially if this will help you bag that coveted A on Burn Night…