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Studying And Note-Taking

**This content is excerpted from the Guerilla Manual for Adult College Students. To learn more about the book or author visit AdultStudents.com .

"There's lots of stuff at home that requires my attention. So frequently I'll have dinner....then start my work at 10:30 at night. I'll get to bed at 2 or 2:30 AM."
Patrick A. had a four and an eight year old and worked 20+ hours a week in addition to going to college full time. He graduated in May of 1998 and went on for his Master's.

Buffing up your study skills can save you time and energy.

As noted in the previous chapter, studying is probably the most important aspect of going to college. It is what drives grades, which drive credit, which drive your graduation. If you are returning to school after ten, twenty, thirty years of being away from formal education, you are probably not used to methodically absorbing and categorizing knowledge. Don't let this discourage you! You actually have these skills, and you use them on an informal basis all the time as an adult. Your entire adult life has been spent learning one thing or another - how to drive a car, how to do your job, how to manage money and raise a family and plan a vacation and the thousands of other details involved with being a grown-up. Every one of these tasks requires learning and studying, and you've been a success at those things for years.

Develop a study method

This is a practical book, hopefully full of practical advice. Here's some about studying: you don't need to learn everything in a given course. You only need to learn what you are going to be tested on or the material necessary to write a convincing paper. Everything else is superfluous to earning that credit. That's not what a lot of academics would like to hear Ð especially from someone like me who earns part of his living from teaching and advising! Ð but it's the truth.

How do you find out what you need to learn? It should be on your syllabus. That schedule should tell you which chapters in your book or outside readings, movies, plays, videos etc. you will be covering.

Or your teacher will tell you, either flat out in class, or by signaling it to you by the amount of time and attention they give it. In many classes there will not be enough time in the semester to cover everything in your text. Or your teacher may decide that certain parts of your text are not worthy of study, and she will substitute other materials for those.

"The kids don't really stay away from me when I'm studying. They're in and around there, and they can be pretty noisy at times. But I've learned - with the amount of kids that I have - to shut them out."
Rich B., 44, has six children.

How much time do you need to study?

Once you have determined what it is that you have to study, the next step is to figure out how long it is going to take you to do that studying. There is a convenient rule of thumb that can get you started with this computation: allocate two to three hours of outside studying for every hour of class.

If you are taking two classes per semester, you will probably be in school roughly six to eight hours per week. Triple or quadruple that number to get a rough gauge of how much time school is going to absorb, both in-class time and study time. So a two-class schedule would mean you are going to have to find at least 18 to 24 hours per week. That includes the time you will actually spend in class.

This number is only roughly accurate, and is going to vary - perhaps quite a bit - for every person and every class. You can refine this a bit by figuring out how fast you read. Read ten pages of your text and time yourself.

How long did it take you? If your text is 400 pages long - pretty typical, by the way - and it took you 20 minutes to thoroughly read and understand 10 pages, 400 pages is going to be 40 times longer, or 800 minutes, or slightly more than 13 hours.

So if you double your reading time from this little exercise, that's close to two hours a week right there. And you haven't made a single trip to the library, visited a single web page, researched a single citation, written a single paper, re-read any of your classroom notes before a test, or tried to analyze the material you've read to figure out what sort of questions might be on an exam.

You can quickly see that this can be a very time-intensive proposition. One you are going to have to carefully fit into the rest of your life.

"I'll wait until everyone's gone to bed and I'll sneak out into the living room with my book and I'll curl up on the couch with the lamp behind me and I'll read."
Evelyn S. has two kids and a husband and went to school full time. She started at a community college in the mid-70s, and Ð more than 25 years later Ð earned her Bachelor's Degree.

Establish a studying schedule

About the first week of every semester you should spend a little time cuddled up with your personal calendar, trying to figure out what you will be doing when for the next fifteen or sixteen weeks. First, fill in actual class times. Don't forget to allow enough time to drive to school (if that's the way you're attending), find a place to park, get to your classroom, etc.

Then, take a long, close look at the syllabus for each class to determine how much reading there will be each week for each class. But before you start allocating time in your calendar for that - and you have to - consider when you might find the time to study.

Nearly every student interviewed for this book got up pretty early in the morning and studied for an hour or two before they started the rest of their day. The reasons varied: the kids were still in bed (and therefore quiet), they had more energy in the morning, they had to be to work early anyway so getting up an hour earlier didn't really matter. The point is pretty clear: time in the morning seems to be more convenient, quieter and made more easily available than time later in the day when all of your adult responsibilities like work and family kick in. It's a good tactic, and it worked well for these students. It will probably work for you too.

The next step in successful scheduling is to make sure that everyone knows about your schedule and agrees to respect it. Posting it on your office door, hanging it over the dining room table or pencilling it in on the kitchen calendar can help keep everyone informed. However you let everyone else know, it's imperative that they agree to it.

Make sure that everyone understands that at certain times of the week you are just not going to be available. And then enforce that, absolutely and without question. It is critically important that you have this time to yourself. Make sure that everyone understands that!

"I study wherever I can. If I've got 10 minutes before I go to work, I'll open up a book and get started on something."
Jason B., has four children, a full time job, a part time job and went to school full time.

Note taking

Note taking is a skill that you probably already have from sitting in those sometimes endless Dilbert-like meetings as a working adult. But even if you don't have much experience taking notes, it's fairly easy to learn. Good notes are not verbatim records of what was said. They are merely meant to be memory joggers, reminders of important points.

The important thing about notes is that they are just that: notes. You are not trying to reinvent the text book here, or rewrite everything you ever learned about a subject. Notes should be short, selective, to the point and relevant to the material. Notes should only jog your memory: they shouldn't be a complete substitute for it.

Recording your class

A couple of caveats are in order. First, this absorbs a lot of extra time. You are effectively attending class twice. Most adult students simply don't have this kind of extra time. If you do, and this technique works for you, then try it. But before you do, you need your professor's permission to tape record the class. By law, his lecture and other classroom activities are officially owned by him, and he holds the copyright to those materials. As silly as it may sound, recording class without his permission is against the law. Instructors typically allow recording. But always ask first.

Take a study skills class at school

Your school probably has a course devoted to the finer points of studying and note taking and how to do them effectively. Short courses like these are commonly offered to adults returning to school. Many of these courses are offered at night or on weekends when they're convenient for working adults, and they usually last only a few hours or so.

Find that study skills course and take it, even though it probably doesn't earn you any credit. You will start getting a return on that small time investment very quickly, and it will more than pay for itself over the years you are in school.

"I tried to allot between 8 to 10 hours of study time for each course per week. That includes the reading and writing papers. But it didn't include coming back and doing research in the library."
Kathleen C., 56, worked full time and completed her degree exclusively through night school.

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