10 Ways to Be a Great Student

You've decided to go back to school. Dare to be the best student you can possibly be. Here are 10 ways to be a great student.

1. Take Hard Classes

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You're paying good money for an education, make sure you get one. There will be classes that are required for your major, of course, but you will have a fair number of electives as well. Don't take classes simply to accrue credits. Take the classes that really teach you something.

Be passionate about learning.

I once had an advisor that said to me when I expressed fear of a difficult class, "Do you want to get an education or not?"

2. Show Up, Every Time

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Make your classes your highest priority.

If you've got children, I understand that this isn't always possible. Children should always come first. But if you don't show up for your classes, you're not getting that education we discussed in No. 1.

Make sure you've got a good plan for seeing that your children are cared for when you're scheduled to be in class, and when you need to study. It really is possible to raise children while you're going to school. People do it every day.

3. Sit in the Front Row

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If you happen to be shy, sitting in the front row can be very uncomfortable at first, but I promise you, it's one of the best ways to pay attention to everything being taught. You can hear better. You can see everything on the board without having to crane your neck around the head in front of you.

You can make eye contact with the professor. Don't underestimate the power of this. If your teacher knows you're really listening and that you care about what you're learning, he or she will be extra willing to help you. Besides, it'll feel like you've got your own private teacher.

4. Ask Questions

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Ask questions immediately if you don't understand something. If you're in the front row and have been making eye contact, your instructor probably already knows by the look on your face that you don't understand something. A polite raising of your hand is all you need to do to indicate you've got a question.

If it isn't appropriate to interrupt, make a quick note of your question so you don't forget, and ask later.

Having said this, don't make a pest of yourself. Nobody wants to hear you ask a question every 10 minutes. If you're completely lost, make an appointment to see your teacher after class.

5. Create a Study Space

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Carve out a place at home that is your study space. If you've got a family around you, make sure everyone understands that when you're in that space, you're not to be interrupted unless the house is on fire.

Create a space that helps you make the most of your study time. Do you need absolute quiet or do you prefer to have loud music playing? Do you like working at the kitchen table in the midst of everything or do you a quiet room with the door shut? Know your own style and create the space you need.

Update! Research shows that varying your study space improves memory: 3 Ways to Improve Memory While Studying

6. Do All the Work, Plus More

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Do your homework. Read the assigned pages, and then some. Plug your topic into the Internet, grab another book at the library, and see what else you can learn about the subject.

Turn your work in on time. If extra credit work is offered, do that too.

I know this takes time, but it'll ensure you really know your stuff. And that's why you're going to school. Right?

7. Make Practice Tests

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While you're studying, pay attention to the material you know will be on a test and write a quick practice question. Start a new document on your laptop and add questions as you think of them.

When you're ready to study for a test, you'll have a practice test ready. Brilliant.

8. Form or Join a Study Group

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A lot of people study better with others. If that's you, form a study group in your class or join one that's already organized.

There are lots of benefits to studying in a group. You have to beorganized. You can't procrastinate. You have to really understand something to be able to explain it out loud to someone else. Grace Fleming, About.com's Guide to Homework and Study Tips, has a great article on Study Groups.

9. Use One Planner

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I don't know about you, but if I had a separate calendar for work, school and life, I'd be a complete mess. When everything in your life is on one calendar, in one planner, you can't double-book anything. You know, like an important test and a dinner with your boss. The test trumps, by the way.

Get a great calendar or planner with enough room for several daily entries. Keep it with you at all times.

10. Meditate

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One of the best things you can do to improve your entire life, not just school, is meditate. Fifteen minutes a day is all you need to feel calm, centered and confident. If you don't know how, here's an easy way to learn: How to Meditate.

Meditate any time, but 15 minutes before you study, 15 minutes before class, 15 minutes before a test, and you'll be amazed at how well you can perform as a student.

Meditate.

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Have you ever tried to study English, but it turned out way too difficult for you? Well, let me tell you that the language of Shakespeare and Austen is easy once you keep in mind these 7 golden rules:

Have you ever tried to study English, but it turned out way too difficult for you? Well, let me tell you that the language of Shakespeare and Austen is easy once you keep in mind these 7 golden rules:

1. Always study and review phrases, not individual words. 

Did somebody give you a dictionary when you started learning your native language as a child? No? Then why do you keep using it when studying a foreign language? Memorizing individual words has absolutely no sense without the context. Learning whole phrases is much more effective. For example, take the word “cantankerous” (meaning “disagreeable and ill-mannered”) - if you tried to memorize it just as it is, you probably wouldn't succeed. But if you put it into a sentence, e.g. “that grumpy cantankerous old man” it's bound to stay in your mind forever.

2. Don’t study grammar. 

Cramming grammar is the quickest way to slow down your progress. When you start thinking about what construction to use, you begin to stammer, stop sounding natural. Your responses should become automatic to master the language, so instead of studying theory – take more practice! When you speak, you don't have time for considering what tense is appropriate, one hundred per cent correct. Grammar is important in writing, not in speaking.

3. Learn with your ears, not with your eyes. 
One of the most common mistakes when studying a foreign language is relying solely on textbooks. Thanks to them you may know a lot of grammar and vocabulary, but you're still not capable of conducting a conversation. It is because you should learn English by listening and not by reading. If you listen more, you'll grasp useful vocabulary and grammar without even realizing it and without memorizing!

4. Learn English deeply. 
Remember it's always about quality, not about quantity. Instead of learning dozens of new words in a short time, try repeating one, but dozens of times. When memorizing the phrases (remember the first rule!) slowly, you put them into the deeper parts of your brain so they don't fade away quickly.

Click here to check Effortless English lessons for yourself!

5. Learn grammar by “point-of-view” stories. 
Never learn grammar by heart. Instead listen to short stories that are told in various tenses. This way you will improve your grammar automatically and naturally. For example, if a story begins: “I don't like banana but I want to eat one”, the other stories would be like “I didn't like bananas but I wanted to eat one” and “I won't like bananas but I will want to eat one”. (The last sentence may sound a bit silly, but doesn't matter so much. In fact, we tend to learn strange and funny things easier.)

6. Use only authentic English materials. 
Throw away any textbooks you possess! Practice your English by reading and listening to “real stuff” - unabridged and unsimplified versions of books, movies and podcasts. There's a lot of free materials for students of English who want to improve their language skills naturally, for example BBC or CNN podcasts.

7. Listen and answer, not listen and repeat. 
A variety of English textbooks employs this completely useless method: “repeat after the speaker...”. You should answer the questions asked by the speaker instead of mindlessly retelling his words. If you practice listening with a podcast or a video, pause it every 20 – 30 second and summarize what has been said. You have to think quickly, so you stop bothering yourself with useless grammar and start to speak the real, living language! Maybe you have already heard or thought about these rules but now the time has come to put them into practice! Print and hang them on your fridge and, most importantly, act accordingly. I assure you that your English is going to improve in no time.

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The most efficient ways to learn English

What is the difference between effective and efficient? Let's say you had to travel from Rome to Paris; what means of transportation would you use? You could walk, run, ride a bike, drive a car, use a motorcycle, take a train, or fly (by plane). All of these methods of transportation are effective, they work; you will get there. But, which methods require the least amount of energy and accomplish the job in the shortest period of time? These methods are the most efficient. I am sure you would agree that traveling by plane is more efficient than riding a bike although Lance Armstrong might not agree.

Learning English can be broken down into two areas: input and output. Input consists of reading and listening while output consists of writing and speaking. Clearly, in order to have good quality output, you must have a lot of good quality input. Think of how long a child listens before beginning to speak. As adults, we are not going to wait two years before attempting to speak, but the more input we get, the more output we can produce. The same applies for reading and writing. The more you read, the better you write. I can even say that the more you read, write and listen, the better you speak.

My advice to all serious English learners is to approach your goal with a sense of urgency. That means you need to work effectively, but more importantly, you need to work efficiently. Based on my years of teaching and studying foreign languages, I have put together what I consider to be the most effective and efficient ways to develop each area of language.

Input

Reading

Learn at least five new vocabulary words every day. My suggestion is to use index cards with the word on one side and the definition on the other. Keep the cards in a box and review them frequently by saying the word and trying to give the definition. Keep the definitions as short and concise as possible. Five to seven words is best. If you learn five words a day, that’s 1,825 words per year. Considering that the average high school student probably has a vocabulary of 5,000 to 6,000 words, in a few years your vocabulary should be sufficient enough to understand nearly everything written in English.
Time commitment: 30 minutes.

Listening

Listen to talk radio. The objective of listening to English is to hear as many words as possible in as short a period as possible. The more times you hear a word, the better you will be able to use that word. There is no more efficient way to do this than talk radio. The vocabulary is very diverse and there are no periods of silence because unlike television, visuals cannot be used to keep an audiences attention. The key is to listen as often as possible. Maximize your time by listening to talk radio when doing other activities such as driving, walking, cooking, eating, getting dressed. If you can, try keeping the radio on while you go to sleep so it's the last thing you hear while falling asleep and the first thing you hear as you wake up.
Time commitment: 0.

Output

Writing

Keep a journal and write at least 500 words per day. By writing every day you will be reinforcing everything you have learned. It will also force you to question the accuracy of what you are writing. This process of intense concentration will help organize the vast array of information you have in your subconscious mind. Write about whatever you want, but be sure to challenge yourself with new vocabulary and various grammar structures.
Time commitment: 30 minutes.

Speaking

Read aloud. Reading aloud allows you to practice perfectly. Remember that it is perfect practice that makes perfect. By reading aloud you are speaking grammatically perfect English. If you have a typical conversation, errors will be made. Not just for English learners, but for native speakers as well. If  errors are repeated continually, it becomes increasingly more difficult to correct those errors. Also, you will be using vocabulary words that you would not normally use. In a typical one hour conversation, you might speak for 30 minutes with a number of errors, but if you read aloud, you can speak for one hour without any grammar mistakes using new vocabulary words.
Time commitment: 1-2 hours minimum.

Do these four things each day for one month and I promise you that you will be amazed at your improvement. There are no secrets to language acquisition, just a lot of hard work to accomplish something that will enhance your life forever.

Successful people do the things that unsuccessful people are unwilling to do!

I wish you all the best on your journey!

By Thomas

Thomas Williams is a teacher at EC San Diego English School

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4 Steps to Successful Brainstorming

Almost everybody does brainstorming wrong, Ralph Keeney says, and turns it into an enormous waste of time. He wants to tell you how to do it right.

An emeritus professor at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business and a consultant to such diverse organizations as the Department of Energy and, just last month, a German power company with $40 billion in revenues, Keeney has devoted his career to a discipline called “decision science,” helping companies and government agencies bring focus and rigor to their decision-making process so that they can waste less time spinning their wheels and instead get clear on their objectives before they try to meet their goals. Thirteen years ago he penned a book, still in print, called Value-Focused Thinking:  A Path to Creative Decision-Making, which says that most corporate executives put the cart before the horse. Instead of parsing the objectives they hope to achieve, they direct their energy at coming up with solutions to broadly-stated problems.

“When most people do brainstorming, they run all over the place and think outside the box,” he says. “I think they should think inside the box—the right-sided box.”

Instead of packing executives into a conference room and brainstorming solutions, Keeney met for one hour each with 19 top people, including the CEO. He pressed them on what they thought the company’s objectives were. Then he compiled a list of 450 things the executives wanted to achieve.  He took the hundreds of objectives and boiled them down to 40 major goals, with 200 subsets. Why? Because, as his paper says, before you brainstorm, it’s essential to go through the process of analyzing and focusing on objectives. Here are Keeney’s four steps to effective brainstorming:His latest paper, published in the December issue of a journal called Decision Analysis, spells out what he believes is the right approach. In Germany for instance, the company he counseled is trying to cope with a vastly changed energy landscape, where nuclear power will be banned as of 2022, coal emissions restricted, and by 2020 at least 20% of the company’s energy must come from non-carbon-emitting sources. “The company has to change phenomenally in order to exist 10 years out,” he says.

1. Lay out the problem you want to solve.
This may be easier said than done.  Keeney describes a doctoral student who is at sea while trying to come up with a dissertation topic and advisor.  The student grasps for ideas with only the vaguest idea of a goal, stated as negatives rather than positives. “I don’t think I could do it,” “it is not interesting to me,” “it seems too hard,” and “it would be too time consuming.” Then finally someone suggests an idea that doesn’t have any of those negatives. The doctoral student grabs the topic. But Keeney says this is a poor way to make a major decision. Instead the student should keep pushing until they come up with at least five more alternatives, and then, considering all those, “identify your objectives for your dissertation, evaluate the alternatives and select the best.” It will be well worth the effort.

2. Identify the objectives of a possible solution.This is what Keeney did for the German energy company and what he’s done for several government agencies, including the Department of HomelandSecurity and the energy department. It’s not easy and it takes time but if you can approach your goals critically and hone in on what you want to achieve, your brainstorming session will be much more effective.

Keeney offers a great example of this process. David Kelley, the founder of renowned design firm IDEO, wanted to design a product that would enable cyclists to transport and drink coffee while they were riding.  A couple of ways to describe what he wanted to design: “spill-proof coffee cup lids,” or “bicycle cup holders.”  But a much better description is the following objective: “helping bike commuters to drink coffee without spilling it or burning their tongues.”  Keeney likes this statement because it clearly lays out IDEO’s objectives, to help  bike commuters 1) drink coffee, 2) avoid spills, 3) not burn their tongues. He even contributes a few objectives of his own: avoid distractions while biking, don’t contribute to accidents, keep the coffee hot and minimize costs. Going into that much detail before  brainstorming about ways to design the cup holder makes IDEO much more likely to succeed.

3. Try to generate solutions individually.
Before heading into a group brainstorming session, organizations should insist that staffers first try to come up with their own solutions. One problem with group brainstorming is that when we hear someone else’s solution to a problem, we tend to see it as what Keeney calls an “anchor.” In other words, we get stuck on that objective and potential solution to the exclusion of other goals. For instance, when Keeney was consulting with a cell phone maker years ago, the company had numerous objectives. It wanted to produce a lightweight phone that also had GPS capabilities (Keeney did this consulting gig some time ago, but he insists the example remains illustrative). When company executives got together to brainstorm ideas about how to build a better phone, one person brought up the issue of weight. Suddenly everyone became fixated on that idea and forgot about their other objectives. Coming into a meeting with potential solutions reduces the risk that participants will get bogged down on one objective.

4. Once you have gotten clear on your problems, your objectives and your personal solutions to the problems, work as a group.

Though he acknowledges that it’s a challenge not to “anchor” on one solution in a brainstorming session, Keeney believes that if participants have done their homework, clarifying the problem, identifying objectives, and individually trying to come up with solutions, a brainstorming session can be extremely productive.

At the end of the paper, he describes a 2008 workshop he held to try to come up with ways to improve evacuations in large buildings in case of a terrorist attack, based on a recommendation from the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Keeney brainstormed for two-and-a-half days with 30 people with expertise in everything from firefighting and building codes to handicapped people and human behavior. The result, after going through Keeney’s four-step process: a list of 300 new alternative ways to speed evacuation. Then the participants evaluated the many ideas, which included using cell phone alarms to guide people to exits and building linked sky bridges on every fifth floor. The hope, of course, is that these solutions will never be tested. But Keeney’s brainstorming method helped the group find effective suggestions.

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