Not quite recently, but after skating through high school and most of college I learned that if you read through your notes before a test you remember more things. I also learned that this is referred to as “studying”.
I am convinced that being “smart” in high school and college stunted my career. I didn’t do any work in high school, and had like 2 classes that I’d consider difficult in college. I never learned the value of hard work.
Same for me! Everyone told me I was smart, so I never studied in college. Turns out you can still be smart and also fail out of college. Luckily got my act together, but I hold some resentment for my teachers and parents for not teaching m that you can have a knack for things but without follow through it’s worthless
All through high school/college I just always wrote my notes once during class, then almost never referred to them again. For me, just the act of writing out the notes was usually good enough to help me retain the information, for the tests at least. I’ve forgotten most of it, but it was there when I needed it.
You aren’t the only one. I was taking an upgrade class at work and another student saw me taking notes. The instructor told her that a lot of his pupils do something similar.
I’ve seen several articles that claim that taking notes with pen and paper helps people retain information better than taking notes on a keyboard.
I just saw a paper on that. I think the basic idea is that the reason you remember better from handwritten notes versus typing is that each letterform has a unique shape that you have to write down. So your fingers/hands are following along by some sort of choreographed muscle memory when you’re writing stuff down, it’s like a sort of dance that our hands do, tracing out all these letter forms, there’s more uniqueness and complexity to it that somehow stays with us better. Compare that to typing where you’re literally just doing the same action over and over again, you’re just pushing buttons down. You might be able to focus more on what the professor is saying, but you’re more just passively taking it in and your mind isn’t as engaged in your note-taking.
Cramming is a form of studying, and is still significantly better than my original strategy of “I remember what they said in class”.
That annoying character in The Land Before Time is not named Sarah.
Her name is Cera. As in CERATOPS.
English spelling is just fantastic. If you hear a new word, there’s pretty much 0 chance that you can look it up in a dictionary on the first try. Just imagine how “epitome” sounds to someone who isn’t already familiar with it. You’re going to have to go though every vowel before you actually find it.
Also, if you’ve never heard a special word being pronounced, but you’ve read it many times, you are pretty much guaranteed to make a fool of yourself when you finally get to use that word in a social situation. No wonder why spelling bees are a thing in English speaking countries.
I read somewhere that you should never look down on anyone for mispronouncing a word because it means they learned it by reading.
As a childhood bookworm, that lesson stuck with me.
Thank you for this.
I used to get picked on a lot by my family because I was made of books (by hs I was going through 1000 pages a day on average), and often mispronounced words I’d never heard used…
In college I took a linguistics course and learned a similar lesson about speaking and both pronunciation and word choice, and how it’s not only highly regional and always evolving, but also influenced very heavily by native tongue and socioeconomic status (how many years of education, for example, or languages spoken at home), so judging people for being imperfect speakers or writers is pointless. They are doing this wildly difficult thing, communicating, and as long as what they are conveying is understood, it was a successful exchange! Yay!
I thought it was “for all intensive purposes” until I finally came across it while reading, and I was reading a book a week for well over a decade at that point. That’s just the way it’s pronounced down here.
But when you shared that lesson out loud for the first time, did you pronounce it correctly?
This feels like a gross exaggeration of the problems with English. there’s a lot of patterns to English, despite a lot of weirdness and a lot of exceptions. But if you hear a new word, it will normally be easy to find in the dictionary on the first try. All that being said, yeah English is probably a mess compared to most languages, which is why it has spelling bees
spelling bees are a thing in English speaking countries
I think they’re just an American thing
And there’s a bar near me that’s starting Adult Spelling Bee night, as opposed to trivia night. I think we’re about to hit peak Idiocracy.
Respite was the epitome of your second paragraph, for me. (That sentence works on two levels in this context). Had always thought it was pronounced like re-spite until I said that out loud and was mocked for it.
Respite is one of those words. You don’t get to use or hear it very often. Come to think of it, I would probably pronounce it the logical way, just like you did. Ok, now I’m going to have to look it up.
Turns out, difference pages give a slightly different pronunciation: /rĕs′pĭt/, ri-ˈspīt, /ˈres.paɪt/, /ˈres.pət/. So, the first vowel is mostly /e/ and the last one seems to be /ı/ if some kind.
English spelling is weird but thats not really a hard word to spell compared to many others. Epitome is either an e or an i, and I would argue a native speaker would lean heavily towards e as a first guess. There is no way that it starts with a, o, or u for example. That’s hardly “every vowel”. It’s at most 2 vowels and most people would have better than even odds if they heard epitome pronounced correctly.
The first time I heard it, was in a BBC documentary about old cars. The pronunciation was nowhere near /ɪˈpɪt.ə.mi/. I think it started with something like /ə/ instead, and that sound corresponds with way too many letters and I haven’t figured out how to make any sense of that.
Fortunately, modern tools will help you find the word you’re looking for, so knowing the correct spelling isn’t that critical any more. However, I was using a paper dictionary at the time, which explains why it took so long.
That you aren’t supposed to rinse immediately after brushing your teeth. It’s better to wait 15 minutes to let the fluoride strengthen your enamel.
Been brushing the wrong way for 30 years, apparently.
You’re probably right, I just hate that toothpaste aftertaste and feeling in my mouth otherwise
Yes, this is correct. I do not rinse. Nor do I get my brush wet before brushing. The only water I use is to rinse my brush after brushing.
Yeah. I had to give a “how to” class and I picked brushing your teeth as a simple topic. I got to the end after brushing your teeth. I said rinse your mouth out and your done. The instructor said “the presentation was okay, but you aren’t supposed to rinse your teeth out right away.”
I had no idea as amid to late 20 something at the time. What else do you do wrong?
So I tried this for a few months last year. Although I didn’t rinse 15 mins afterwards or anything - I just spit as much of the toothpaste out as I could.
Couldn’t really tell a difference other than it was strange feeling to have all the toothpaste remnants in your mouth. Maybe my teeth were slightly whiter? I eventually went back to my old ways of rinsing. Maybe I’ll try it again though.
The guy who runs Reddit is an utter douchebag.
I spent 30+ years thinking that a pony was a baby horse rather than a smaller type of horse. You know how cats have kittens and dogs have puppies? Well I thought horses had ponies.
Even all the times that Lisa Simpson wanted a pony, I just thought it was similar to how a kid might want a puppy.
