I am a bad student

[trinityvixen]

I have many bad-student issues. I'm a procrastinator. I never learned to skim textbooks, I always have to plod through them, reading everything start-to-finish. I make lousy review notes. I never really cottoned on to writing papers with an outline; except for the odd research paper, everything was sort of free form following from a thesis. I always have to work/study/do homework to music or I start to freak myself out with quiet. (I barely went to libraries in college, and never without music when I did.) I usually do all my work on my bed, which leads me to fall asleep more often than not.

Today's bad-student issue is the inability to study on the day I have a test. Review, maybe. Look over problems, sure. But not with half-so-much attention as I had last night when I did TONS of review problems, or Sunday/Saturday when I did just about every odd-numbered problem in the textbook. Now that it's actually game day, I find myself barely able to LOOK at the textbook, much less prep. I barely remembered to make up my equations cheat-sheet that I'm allowed to bring to the test.

I'm really bad on test days. I would take every test first thing in the day, given the option, because having the day available to study does me no good and only makes me nervous--mostly about how much extra study time I'm not using...

Aiyah. Is it 6 yet?

Comments

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

That's only a problem if you were counting on that study time and then can't use it. If you didn't study last week, figuring you'd study today, problem. But if you always do this and did your studying early, then studying today wouldn't help anyway.

And reading all of the textbook is slower, but probably teaches you more than the people who just skim for the test.

It sounds like you're a lousy bad student - you actually do all the reading and prepare ahead!

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I never feel I've studied enough. More, it feels like I've run out of things to study with--problem sets, powerpoint lectures--but haven't retained some magical "enough" that will make me feel less worried about this. I'm comparing what time I spent studying for this to what I did for my previous class, and it seems like nothing. But maybe the last class was just nuts? I dunno...