Reading Textbooks: The Right Way, The Fast Way, The Wrong Way

For many classes, everything you need to know for the class is in the textbook. The problem is that you need to read the textbook.

If you want to do well in the class, and you are going to spend the time reading, you might as well do it right. Here are some ways to read textbooks:

The Right Way: When you really need to learn the material, here is the best way that I have found to read and retain information from a textbook. It is my practical, faster version of the SQ3R method. Follow these steps:

• Skim everything that is not a paragraph. The great thing about textbooks is that they put all of the important items where they are easy to read - boldfaced titles, italics, diagrams, picture captions, end of the chapter summaries. Read these quickly.
• Ask yourself what is important. You are more likely to find the answer if you know what the question is, so ask yourself what the textbook author wants you to know based on the material you skimmed in step one.
• Read the paragraphs and take notes - quickly. Now is the time to read the chapter in order, but keep a fast pace so that you don't get bogged down. Every two or three paragraphs, write down a line of notes. Review last month's newsletter for tips on note taking.
• Use two column notes. In the left margin next to each line of note, write a title - two or three words that describe the content of the notes.
• Review. Skim over the chapter headings, illustration captions, and end of chapter material just like you did at the beginning. Did you learn about all of the important things that the textbook highlighted?
• Study. Fold your page of notes over so that the titles in the margin are showing. Test youself. Do you know the information that goes with each title?

The best part about this method is that your brain is exposed to the content several times. Each time you skim, read, write down notes, look at your notes, or review, the information is cemented in your memory.

The Fast Way: But what if you are too busy to read the correct way? Do the best with the time you have. You know how you skimmed the boldfaced titles, chapter headings, italicized phrases, illustration captions, and end of the chapter stuff in the instruction above? Since that has most of the important information, this is where you should go when you are pressed for time. Ten minutes of skimming will give you a lot more than reading the first two pages of the chapter.

The Wrong Way: Do not read a textbook the way that you would read a novel. If you just sit down and start reading in order, it is not likely that you will remember as much. Furthermore, if you run out of time, you will stop reading where you are and get nothing out of the end of the chapter.

Strangely, reading a textbook should be a lot like surfing the web - lots of skimming and looking at pictures, with close reading only where you need it. This is especially true if you are reading an electronic textbook on an iPad or other device.

Speaking of devices, don't forget that our Essay Engine shows you how to write great essays and works wonderfully on all internet-connected devices.

Orange Tic Tacs: The Key to Better Exam Grades

An old student of mine that is now in college posted on Facebook that she had a big exam to study for. I gave her my favorite study advice. Eat Orange Tic Tacs. 

The trick is to eat the Tic Tacs while you study your notes and text book. It does not necessarily have to be Orange Tic Tacs; it just has to be a candy or breath mint that you rarely eat. It also must have a strong scent. Then, don't eat that candy any other time. Finally, eat the candy while you take your exam. You will be shocked how well you remember the content and how well you do on the test. 

Don't believe me? Think about this...What is your favorite smell? Take a moment and think about it. Now answer this - why is it your favorite smell? I have asked my students this question a few times, and none of them say that their favorite smell is the best because it is sweet or makes their nose feel good. They all tell stories of a happy time that is associated with the smell. The smell of the ocean that reminds the of a trip to the beach with their friends. The smell of their grandmother's chocolate cake that she makes on everyone's birthday. The smell of chalk that the student uses at gymnastic meets. 

Smells are linked more directly with memory than any other sense. How many times have you caught a faint whiff of a scent that reminds you of a person or place that you have not thought of for years? It's almost like your nose remembers better than you do.

Why not harness that olfactory-mnemonic power to help you on a test? The trick is give your nose a smell during the test that will remind you of the good ol' days when you had your notes and textbook in front of you. It will increase your recall and make your test easier. I haven't heard how my old student did on her ram, but I bet she's happy with the results. 

Of course, Tic Tacs won't help you if you have an essay instead of an exam. That's what our Essay Engine is for, it will make essay writing a breeze. 

Stay tuned for my next post on the Teachademics blog where I share with all of the teachers why the Tic Tac trick really works. 

Make a New Year’s Resolution You Can Keep

At some point in the school year, every student promises his/herself (or parents) that he/she will do better in school.

If getting better grades is one of your New Year’s resolutions, here are some tips on how to make that happen.

Organize Your Notebook(s): A leading cause of lower grades is lost papers. Fortunately, this is one of the easiest ones to fix. This January, clean out you notebook. Put old, graded, papers in a file or box. Don’t throw anything away until the end of the school year, but you don’t need to care it around every day. Put all notes in one section of your notebook. Put all papers that your teacher has given to you in a different section – if your teacher has taken the time to xerox something, it probably is worth keeping. Put all of your work in progress in a third section. I always recommend a different notebook for each core subject.

Read! Keep your brain sharp. Keep it from turning to mush with too much time on social media or playing video games. Read a book for fun or even a few magazines – anything that is not on a screen. Reading book for half of an hour a day in a quite place will lengthen your attention span, improve your vocabulary, and increase your retention when you have to read boring school books when school resumes.

Use a Homework Calendar: An electronic organizer, a pocket spiral notepad, a My Little Pony wall calendar, it does not matter. When you start the new year, have a place where you write down every assignment, paper, and test. I even suggest that you cross out each item as you complete it.

Communicate with your Teacher: Answer questions in class (even if you are wrong). Ask your teacher questions after class when you need a hand (try email if there is no time). Share an article you have seen that is related to a class topic. Teachers love when students are engaged, and they love to help. If a project or lesson is unclear, ask a question right away - it is easier and more effective than complaining about a low grade later.


Try Clickademics Essay Engine: We built Essay Engine to help you write better, more organized essays in less time. In most classes, essays are a large grade, and nailing an essay will really boost your average.

What Parents Should Know About Teachers

Ideally, parents and teachers are allies, teaming up to help students succeed. However, things go wrong when there are hidden, often unrealistic, expectations. As a parent and a teacher, I have glimpsed both sides, and everyone’s expectations would be much more realistic if they knew a little more about the other. This week, I am writing parallel posts, what parents should know about teachers and what teachers should know about parents.

It’s because they are crazy busy

The most important thing that parents should know about teachers is that they are busy, like super freaky busy. The actual teaching is a very small part of a teacher’s day, eclipsed by classroom discipline, record keeping, lesson preparation, and grading.

Be your child’s advocate

If your child can’t see the board, doesn’t understand the assignment, or still has last week’s homework in her backpack, it’s not because the teacher doesn’t care, it is because he is crazy busy. The teacher wishes he could give each student individual attention, but when he can’t, send an email. Better yet, encourage your student to talk to the teacher before class.

Make manageable requests

If your child needs special attention, try to make it something the teacher can do quickly, because the teacher is crazy busy. Appropriate request: move the child to the front of the class, send home an extra copy of the textbook, reply to an email asking about a low test grade. Inappropriate request: give one-on-one tutoring after school every Monday, call the parent with a behavior report every day, type up the notes from the board since the child didn’t write them down.

They don’t stop working at 3:00

Save the “Must be nice to only work half the day” jokes. I would regularly plan lessons and grade until 10:00 most nights and grade research papers for most of Spring Break. Like most teachers, I either had a summer job, taught summer school, or took care of my own kids during summer, so it’s not like I was lounging around for three months a year.

Don’t go to Hawaii during a school week

Because the teacher would have to write up a special set of instructions and assignments just for your child and process all of the makeup work late just for your child. And the teacher is crazy busy. And because you’re spoiling your kid.

Doing your child’s homework is worse than you think

Teachers really do use homework to gauge the student’s progress, and when the parent does the homework, it really cheats the student. The teacher believes that the student is ready to move on to more complex concepts. When a student does not know how to do something, he needs explanation either from the teacher or the parent, which is one of the reasons I created my Essay Engine program so that kids could get appropriate help writing essays. But when the parent just writes the essay herself, that robs the student of a learning experience and wastes the teacher’s time. I once had a student turn in an essay that was full of words she did not know. The next time I saw her mom, I told how great it was that her daughter was writing at a 9^th grade level! It was all she could do not to mention her master’s degree in French lit.

Save your peppermint bark

Making a batch of your favorite homemade desert seems like a great holiday gift, but when 17 other families have the same idea, it's enough sugar to send a teacher into diabetic shock. The best gifts are either a card with a heart-felt message inside or a Starbucks’ gift card. Don’t you people know that caffeine greases the wheels of academia? Unless you are a Tiger Mom; they give super good gifts because they don’t mess around.

Realize that teachers are happy to work hard for the kids

Just about every teacher I know went into education because they have a heart for kids. Though they make mistakes, they honestly are doing their best for the greatest number of students that they can. The veterans have seen enough “D” students go on to run companies and seen enough class clowns go on to be well-known public figures, so they know that every child has potential to succeed. The teacher never “has it out” for your kid, unless you take your kid to Hawaii during a school week. That will go in the secret file in the principal’s office that gets attached to the kid’s college application.

Helping with Homework? Have a Highlighter Handy

It always happens when you are most busy trying to get dinner ready, getting some work done, or hustling the kids toward bed time. “I need help on my homework!” The worst part is that helping your kids with homework the right way takes a lot longer than you would like.

When I was teaching 8th grade, I had a lot of parents ask a lot of questions, but they almost never asked the most important question: how should parents help with homework? If they did ask, my short answer would be: help with a highlighter.

The worst thing a parent can do is just give the student the correct answer. First, it gives the student an easy way out without having to learn the lesson in the homework. Secondly, it leads the teacher to believe that the student has mastered the material when he or she has not. Lastly, it subtly gives the message that the parent does not believe the student can get the answer. But, it is a lot easier and faster for the parent.

The best thing a parent can do is show the student how to get the right answer. If the student doesn’t understand the concept, a few minutes of explanation can make all the difference. It may only take ten minutes, but rarely does a classroom teacher have ten minutes to devote to each student.

Parents should also teach their children how to catch their own mistakes. When my students wrote essays, I asked their parents to “Help with a highlighter” because highlighters are good at marking a spot on the page but bad for writing corrections. Parents should mark where a mistake is, but let the student figure out what was incorrect and how to fix it. When my son has math homework, I always look it over afterward. If I find errors, I tell him how many mistakes there are and let him find them. I might add that it is on the bottom half of the page if the homework is long. By training students to catch and repair their own mistakes, parents prepare them for the times when they are not around. 

This is especially helpful since kids need feedback as fast as possible. If a student knows there are spelling mistakes on tonight’s homework, he or she is motivated to make the corrections. If that same student gets a paper back a week later with spelling errors marked, it means nothing. This was a motivating factor when we were developing our Clickademics Essay Engine. If we could teach a student to write an introductory paragraph as they were writing their essay, it would be meaningful to the student and, hopefully, stick in their long term memory. In most classrooms, students learn how to write an introductory paragraph a week before writing the essay or a week later when the teacher reviews the corrected essays in class. By then it is ancient history.

So helping your student with homework is pretty much like everything else about parenting, there is an easy way that pays off now, and there is a harder way that pays off later. Usually pays off longer, too.

Easiest Way to Do Better in School

After a decade and a half in the classroom, my best advice for students: ask questions.

Here is a little secret, teachers love engaged students. Many of us went into teaching to work with curious young people, to help them discover more about the world and themselves.  Nothing spoils that quite like a group of distracted students, unless it is a group of zoned out zombie students. Just one student who is listening, thinking, and wanting to understand can make a teacher's whole day.  With just a little effort, your child could be that student.  A simple, "Why does it work like that?" Is all it takes.

Students should also ask questions to clear up confusion. Between the teacher's lesson, directions for assignments, and classroom management, there are a lot of instructions in an hour of class. No student can remember them all. A student should ask right away if he or she does not understand something, because if one student is confused, there are probably others in the room that have the same question. When I was teaching, I had students who would only ask questions after getting the wrong answer on an exam or scoring poorly on a project. By then, it was too late to help. If they had sent an email or stayed after class for 5 minutes, I could have cleared everything up. 

Lastly, students should ask questions to show initiative. Teachers create assignments and project for the whole group, but not every student learns the same way. If a student has a clever idea, it never hurts to ask. If the student enjoys making movies, he could ask if he could make a documentary instead of writing an essay. Why not? The teacher may still want him to work on his writing skills, but it shows the teacher that the student is thinking ahead, and perhaps the teacher may create a film making project later in the year. I remember being in a college philosophy class that had one of my last final exams of the year. I asked the professor if I could skip the final and instead write a paper that showed that all of the major concepts that would be covered in the exam could be found in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The teacher loved the idea, I showed that I understood the concepts, and I got to fly home a day early.

Of course, the delivery of the question matters. The middle of class is fine if the student is confused by the lesson being taught at that moment, but most other questions are best before or after class or by email.

Here’s a couple questions for you. Have you checked out our Clickademics Essay Engine yet? Have you told a friend who needs help writing essays? Have you liked us on Facebook?

Computers Should Be Like Art Supplies, Not Textbooks (or BYOD)

Many schools are thinking about 1-to-1 programs where each student receives a tablet or laptop. The reasons for these programs are very compelling.  Teachers can assign exciting, high-tech projects, students can access all of the new content online, and parents and people in the community are impressed by the students carrying around fancy hardware. 

In this sense, schools are treating devices like textbooks where each student receives one at the beginning of the year. I believe, however, that schools should think of devices like art supplies. No school would ever buy a full set of paints for every student in the school. Instead, they have many different types of art supplies available for students to use depending on the project.  When students want to make a sculpture, the school provides clay. When the student is painting, there is paint available in class. If the student is asked to make a simple poster or a photography project, the student just uses colored pens or a camera that he or she already has at home. This is how devices should be in schools. 

Schools should not be buying devices for all of their students for a few reasons:

1. Many students, especially at more affluent schools, already have a computing device at home. Giving the student a second one is redundant. 
2. Schools will always buy the same device for all of the students, but they don’t all need the same one. Some students use prefer a tablet to a laptop, Windows to Mac, depending on their learning style and experience.
3. Students may need different devices on different days. iPads are great for consuming media like educational videos and electronic textbooks. Laptops may be heavier, but they are necessary for content creation like writing a long paper or a using photographs. Editing a video is best done on a desktop computer.
4. Most educational tasks - reading textbooks, writing notes, composing essays, watching videos, using educational apps - are web-based, so the device is just a window with internet access. Though many apps are device specific, written for iOS or Android, more and more will simply be web apps that are independent of the operating system. This is why we at Clickademics chose to make our Essay Engine a web-app instead of a native iOS app.

If the school does not purchase devices for all of the students, it is difficult to expect every single student to be able to complete projects that require a computer or tablet. I would propose that the school help families for whom it would be a burden to purchase a device. Like a scholarship, the school to arrange discounts or provide free devices to the students that require it. The school should also have a number of tablets, laptops, and desktops available to students who have come to school without a device or require something different for the day’s lesson. One or two members of the IT staff should be available to troubleshoot and perform basic repairs. All of this would be significantly less expensive than buying an iPad for every student.

The most important thing is that the learning comes first, not the device. Teachers and administrators need to set learning goals first, then figure out the lessons and projects that will help the students master the learning. Only then should they think about devices necessary to reach those goals and complete those projects. Sometimes, paper and pencils are still the best devices for learning.

Lastly, remember that the life expectancy of computer devices is shrinking. Desktops used to be good for about 6 years, then laptops were good for about 4. Tablets and smart phones are usually used for two years. If a school invested in an iPad program, they would be left with out-dated hardware after a 3 or 4 years. Students would begin bringing their newer devices from home, and the school would soon become a campus where the students bring their own laptop or tablet from home, similar to what I have proposed here. Schools should save the initial expense and start a Bring Your Own Device program from the start.