Chapter 16 Flashcards
(11 cards)
Describe an example of how you were absolutely 100 percent certain of something and were later proven wrong.
As a result of these and similar incidents, do you think you are more capable of accepting criticism of your ideas from others?
How could you make your study sessions with classmates more effective?
How would you handle it if you found yourself in a group that seemed to focus on other issues besides your studies?
TEAMWORK FOR INTROVERTS
I’m an introvert and I don’t like working with people. But when I wasn’t doing so well in mycollege engineering classes (back in the 1980s), I decided that I needed a second pair ofeyes, although I still didn’t want to work with anyone. Since we didn’t have online chattingback then, we wrote notes on each other’s doors in the dorms. My classmate Jeff and Ihad a system: I would write ‘1) 1.7 m/s’—meaning that the answer to homework problemone was 1.7 meters per second. Then I’d get back from a shower and see that Jeff hadwritten, ‘No, 1) 11 m/s.’ I’d desperately go through my own work and find a mistake, but nowI had 8.45 m/s. I’d go down to Jeff’s room and we’d argue intensively with both oursolutions out while he had a guitar slung around his shoulder. Then we’d both go back toour own work on our own time and I’d suddenly see that the answer was 9.37 m/s, and sowould he, and we’d both get 100 percent on the homework assignment. As you can see,there are ways to work with others that require only minimal interaction if you don’t likeworking in groups.”
Why is it important to take mental breaths and revisit what you’ve finished? Why could not doing this drag you down?
Be careful when you’re not stopping to take a mental breath, and then revisit what you’ve done with the bigger picture in mind to see whether it makes sense.
How can you progress through a test like butter?
If your initial work on the first hard problem has unsettled you, turn next to an easy problem and complete or do as much as you can.
Then, move next to another difficult-looking problem and try to make a bit of progress. Again,change to something easier as soon as you feel yourself getting bogged down or stuck.
What is the jump start technique? How is it useful to you when testing yourself?
Why is working on the most difficult stuff usually the most beneficial? Even when you can’t solve it after some thought?
When you start working problems, start first with what appears to be the hardest one.
But steel yourself to pull away within the first minute or two if you get stuck or get a sense that you might not be on the right track.
“Starting hard” loads the first,most difficult problem in mind, and then switches attention away from it. Both these activities can help allow the difuse mode to begin its work.
How could studying either others help you cover your blind spots and strengthen your weaknesses?
Brainstorming and working with others—as long as they know the area—can be helpful.
It’s sometimes just not enough to use more of your own neural horsepower—both modes and hemispheres—to analyze your work.
After all, everyone has blind spots. Your naively upbeat focused modecan still skip right over errors, especially if you’re the one who commited theoriginal errors.
Worse yet, sometimes you can blindly believe you’vegot everything nailed down intellectually, but you haven’t.
(This is the kind of thing that can leave you in shock when you discover you’ve flunked a test you’d thought you aced.)
What makes a good learner? What is equation sheet bingo? How can we trap ourselves with studying patterns instead of the material?
People who haven’t felt comfortable with math often fall into the trap of “equation sheet bingo.”
They desperately try to find a pattern in what the teacher or book did and fit their equations to that pattern.
Good learners vet their work to ensure that it makes sense.
They ask themselves what the equations mean and where they come from.
Why is focusing on being open to being wrong OK sometimes? How can it help you improve yourself? Where should you start to fix the problems you struggle with?
If you go off track early on, it doesn’t matter if the rest of your work is correct—your answer is still wrong.
Sometimes it’s even laughably wrong—the equivalent of calculating a circumference of the earth that is only 21/ 2 feet around.
Yet these nonsensical results just don’t mater to you because the more left-centered focused mode has associated with a desire to cling to what you’ve done.
That’s the problem with the focused, left-hemisphere-leaning mode of analysis.
It provides for an analytical and upbeat approach.
But abundant research evidence suggests that there is a potential for rigidity, dogmatism, andegocentricity
How is it possible to not use parts of your brain? Which part and why? What can you do to avoid that?
When you whiz through a homework or test problem and don’t go back to check your work, you are acting a little like a person who is refusing to use parts of your brain.
You’re not stopping to take a mental breath and then revisit what you’ve done with the bigger picture in mind, to seewhether it makes sense.
