Academic Guide

Guide to Being A Champ in Pointless "Educational" Institutions
Disclaimer: Different habits work for different people. YMMV.

In the following guide I will document the various habits and
philosophies that have helped me academically succeed. The habits simply apply
to the organization and assimilation of information (i.e. studying). With
respect to the philosophies, they form more abstract rules/points/etc to which
I feebly attempt to adhere.

KEY: [HHx] := habit #x
     [PPx] := philosophical point #x
     [SSx] := section #x

Section 1 - Generalized advice [SS1]
[PP1]: Form good personal habits outside of academics. First and foremost,
       this habit eliminates the bulk of excuses you could use to avoid doing
       real academic work. More specifically, shower at least once a day,
       brush and floss every morning and night. If you shave, keep yourself
       clean-shaven. Get all of your chores done as soon as they come
       up.

"What the Englishman said about survival was this: 'If you stop taking pride
 in your appearance, you will very soon die.' He said that he had seen
 several men die in the following way: 'They ceased to stand up straight,
 then ceased to shave or wash, then ceased to get out of bed, then ceased
 to talk, then died.' [...] The Englishman said that he, when captured,
 had made and kept the following vows to himself: To brush his teeth twice
 a day, to shave once a day, to wash his face and hands before every meal
 and after going to the latrine, to polish his shoes once a day, to exercise
 for at least half an hour each morning and then move his bowels, and to look
 into a mirror frequently, frankly evaluating his appearance, particularly
 with respect to posture." - Kurt Vonnegut, _Slaughterhouse Five_

[HH1]: Create quantifiable goals. Seriously, do it. Personally, when I read
       textbooks and work through them, I form a quota of how many problems
       I will do and how many pages or chapters per day I will read.
       Furthermore, make sure you have some sort of overarching end for
       your studying as a whole. Split this objective into smaller sub-
       objectives until you complete what you started.

[HH2]: Ensure an efficient working space. If you're studying seriously,
       you're sitting down in a chair in front of a desk with a nice light
       source.

[HH3]: Stay calm and schedule your work. Assign your objectives to days and,
       optionally, timeslots. On the whole, you should be able to create a
       sensible plan for completing the work for any given week. If you panic,
       your plans will fall apart. In short: create a good plan and stick to
       it.

[PP2]: Live adaptively and efficiently. Some people lack stable
       schedules, and they believe that this lack of stability destroys
       the possibility of an organized lifestyle. This is not so. You simply
       must redistribute time to account for disturbances. What's more, you
       should try to take advantage of human laziness in order to get more
       done. Leave your work within arm's reach as much as possible and
       make sure it's easy to get to work without a hassle.

[PP3]: Realize that very little will come to you without hard work and
       perseverence, etc. This is what will allow you to academically surpass
       the *vast* majority of people. Beyond soul-crushing, gut-wrenching,
       hard work, you'll discover that working smarter helps. As such,
       it can help a lot to optimize your process AFTER you've started working
       hard.

[PP4]: Learn how to cut losses. This means not simply acceptance of failure,
       but acceptance of failure at the correct time. This ability is key to
       keeping up your energy and avoiding overworking. If you overwork, it'll
       hit you very hard. Find out how to push yourself while still exercising
       caution.

[PP5]: As mentioned in the first philosophical point, you must exercise.
       While it may seem like a waste of time, the stress release is well
       worth it. Such a variety of sports and workouts exist that you should
       be able to find at least one you like. Not only will the exercise help
       you unwind, it will help with developing discipline that you may apply
       in other areas.

[HH4]: Always have some intellectually stimulating activity on your plate.
       Personally, I always make sure that I'm reading at least one classic
       literature or philosophy book at any time. You can study some subject
       in your free time if you'd like, or take up chess, or perhaps writing.
       Activities like these keep you on your toes and help with developing
       intellectual prowess at all times. You will actually see yourself
       becoming smarter over time, provided you keep to this habit.

[PP6]: Realize the true nature of your academic work. In secondary school, you
       are generally going to be tasked with assimilating useless information
       en masse. Memorize what you need to memorize for exactly as long you
       need to use it and no longer. The information itself will likely never
       prove of use to you. More importantly, learn what you need to
       learn. Teachers already know this; they realize that the skills you
       gain from manipulating this information comprise the real sources of
       value. Learn to analyze information and to notice patterns. Learn to
       explain why certain patterns carry importance and how one may compose
       patterns in many studies in order to create a more effective end
       product.

[HH5]: Develop a good workflow. Most people do well with an on-off pattern.
       Work for 45 minutes, rest for 15, something like that. If you fail to
       recognize the importance of rest and relaxation, you will crash hard.

[HH6]: Take notes and do exercises in the textbook. If you don't do at least
       one of the two, you're not going to remember anything you study.

Section 2: Subject-specific Advice

Social Studies

Social studies is more or less a study of cause and effect. Create a mental
web of causality to track historical events. Try to take notes linking
people, events, geography, trade, technology, and other factors together. Once
you have created a sufficient web, you should be able to start at any point
in the web and use connections to find the information you desire. Try to read
between the lines as much as is reasonable. The textbook will only tell you
relatively undisputed information; you must make your own conjectures about
how people reacted to events and the nature of culture and collective
consciousness at a given time period. Try to empathize with the people of the
time period you study. Understand *why* they did what they did and the
feelings that drove them to act as they did. Societal standards hold a crucial
significance. What is acceptable and what is unacceptable in a given time
period? Very rarely is history as black-and-white as the textbook says. As for
assignments, you should really know how to write well for a history class.
Generally you should abandon the ornate writing style of English in favor of
packing as much information as possible into history essays.

English

Revise your essays until you cannot see through the red ink. More importantly,
get others to revise your essays until you cannot see through the red ink.
The teacher will probably ask you for incredibly minute details on the author
in his/her quizzes and tests, so be prepared. When you're reading poetry, look
out for hidden meaning and try to understand how the author enhances his/her
poetry with literary devices. Take a poet's work in context of the period of
time in which the poet composed it. You will inevitably have to work with
tie-ins to history in English, unless you work with contemporary literature.
As for prose, you should scour the work for hidden meaning. Because prose
permits longer works, the author will likely employ more subtlety in
expressing hidden meaning. If you're working with a narrative, understand the
importance of the plot's pace and the story's character development. Character
portraits in novels act as a red flag for foreshadowing and other important
details. Work on your diction for essays and take into account your sentence
lengths. Mix in a variety of short, medium, and long sentences in order to
foster a sense of rhythm in your work. Accept that good writing remains hard
to quantify; you will have to laboriously refine your work with the help of
your peers until it seems good.

Math & Science

Work towards a very solid understanding of formal definitions and then use
those definitions dynamically to fit the work teachers present to you. When
you see a definition, function, formula, etc., plug a bunch of different data
into the statement to see how it works and what it implies. For the physical
sciences, understand the physical implications of mathematical formulae.
Understand that scientific models are just that and that they are subject to
revision. Scientific models consist of really good analogies; they rarely
flawlessly model real-life interactions. However, in all likelihood the models
you see will reflect 99% of real-life interactions. If you learn these models,
definitions, etc., you will generally succeed. If you fail to comprehend the
foundations of any science, you will not be successful in your studies.
Algebraic manipulation in mathematics seems to me particularly important.
Realize that the physical sciences generally consist of systems, interactions
interal systems, and interactions external to systems. Take into account that
mathematics problems in secondary school will provide you with all the data
(not necessarily definitions/formulae) necessary to complete the problem,
whereas physical science problems in secondary school will not always provide
you the data necessary to solve a problem. As regards these physical science
problems, in a word, infer.

Foreign Language

I hope you enjoy rote memorization of vocabulary. Accept that gaining a full
knowledge of every dialect of a language approaches insanity. Instead, focus
on a single dialect and understand its nuances well. Learn colloquial phrases;
you will actually use them when speaking with natives, to great effect. Try to
memorize as many words as you can and *use* them. Read literature written in
the language you learn. Write essays in the language you learn. Work on
different linguistic contexts: how would you use the language when writing a
formal letter versus speaking with friends? Strive to acquire good
pronunciation skills. Sounding like a native will impress not only teachers
but also those who you speak to using the language. Rules of syntax tend to be
hard to understand, because they seem to arise from nothing. Make an attempt
to research the origin and nature of confusing linguistic rules in order to
clear the fog. Most importantly, find something you like that primarily uses
the language you learn and then immerse yourself in that thing. Immersion
overtakes every other learning method by a mile in terms of efficiency.