Sometimes coming up with visualizations is easy, and sometimes it is very hard. When we deal with abstract and professional terms, names and languages the visualization process suddenly become complex. There is only so much time we can allocate to visualize and remember everything while reading. How do we deal with such situations? The easiest …
Learning fights depression
Some of our students get depressed. Depression is a very common problem, and we can address it here. Meditation/sports, good sleep and practicing gratitude can partially fight depression. This article shows that learning is also an effective tool to fight depression. How? Sense of purpose Some people claim that happiness is a combination of pleasure …
How to remember a dense book 1000 pages long?
How do we remember a dense book 1000 pages long? This is not a trivial question and it is asked quite often. Obviously, we need a good strategy. As always, everyone can make his own strategy. Quite often I change my strategy based on the content. Let us discuss one possible strategy, and you can …
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Dealing with emotional texts
Reading is a sort of conversation, and like any conversation, it can be stressful. If you disagree with the author and his arguments, will you be able to consider them openly? If reading the text strikes some old wound in your soul, will you focus on the text or your own pain? If you are …
Immersion methods to learn English faster
This is a guest post by Lucy Adams. Lucy Adams is a professional blogger and essay writer. She stumbled upon my blog and offered to write a post about English language and essay writing. Since she has written many essays for people who struggle with English, she offered a perspective on learning English as a …
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Mental math
We have powerful computers, why do we still do mental math? Part of it has to do with building intuition and checking for errors, part of it has to do with the speed of decision making, some of it is a great brain practice and yet a bit of it is a magic. Whatever the …
Physiology of flow
The enigmatic state of “flow” enables us to achieve a lot in a very short timeframe. There are many discussions regarding getting into the flow state: prepare yourself to emerge in work, match the task at hand with your personal skill, anticipate the work, remove whatever blocks your creativity. However, it is very seldom that …
Six types of socratic questions
We ask similar questions after each time we preread or read the text. The questions can be divided into questions building our curiosity so we can focus on the text and questions we asked in order to ensure we understood the text properly. This post mainly deals with questions of the second kind. If we …
Accepting myself
We often proclaim that our students need to find their own way. What do we mean and what is the main obstacle? People are different. This is what makes us more interesting and valuable. Jewish wisdom proclaims “He who saves one soul it’s as if he saved the entire world”. Yet we are continuously conditioned …
Marker dictionary
Occasionally you will need to make a marker dictionary. This method is typically required for medical and legal students, because the terms they use may be so abstract and complex that no reasonable markers can be created spontaneously. To some extent, a large quantity of number memorization (via major system/PAO) or memorization of foreign words …