The purpose of this book is to help you study more efficiently. It will aim to acquaint you with the skills and experiences that will make your study more profitable. First, the basic requirements that you must contribute will be surveyed. Secondly, the tools of the business of study will be explained with emphasis upon the value of those tools. Thirdly, the study skills will be examined, and the habits and practices for the accomplishment of these habits will be presented. This book will have no value for you now, or ever, unless you are willing to take the time to put into practice the skills and habits which will make your study a really constructive and dedicated force, aimed at the ultimate fulfillment of the talents that have been given you.
The material of this book has been reduced to the simplest possible form. Some chapters have been reduced to a minimum of rules and suggestions. This is in no degree an assurance that study will no longer be work. It is not a sinecure for the rest of your school experience. Learning through study will still be hard work. The definition of study will remain what it has always been—the determined, purposeful processes by means of which we learn. Problems in mathematics will still be hard, Latin vocabularies must still be written over and over again to be learned. If you are willing to improve your desire to learn and your study habits, you will at least come to understand what knowledge is; how difficult it is to attain, how much industry, thoroughness, precision, and persistence it demands if you are to have even a distant glimpse of it.
1Harvey Cushing, Life of Sir William Osler, Oxford University Press, 1940, p. 617.
Learning to Listen
It is paradoxical that listening is the easiest way to learn but the hardest study skill to master.
INTEREST MEASUREMENT TEST
1 Do you hear the names of people who are introduced to you?
2 Are you waiting to listen when your teacher begins to speak or do you miss the beginning remarks?
3 Are you thinking of what you are going to say next while someone is speaking to you?
4 Are you addicted to the fatal belief that you can listen to two things at once?
5 Have you ever consciously tested yourself to see how much you can remember of what is said to you?
If the answer to each of these questions is an honest “No,” you need not despair. You can console yourself that you are with the great majority. You can also resolve to train yourself to listen and be successful in the training.
While listening is the easiest and quickest of all the ways to learn, learning to listen—and to use listening as one of the most effective of all the learning processes—is the hardest of all the learning processes to master. Your teachers have been able to help you learn to read and to think, but it is almost impossible for the teacher to give more than awareness-aid to the process of listening. It must be almost wholly self-taught. It was not emphasized in your early training; it is the least susceptible of all the learning processes to discipline; and it is never accomplished except by active and continued practice. Few ever achieve it, but those who do are counted among the students who learn the most, and the persons in society most desirable to know.
Now to learn to think while being taught presupposes the other difficult art of paying attention. Nothing is more rare: listening seems to be the hardest thing in the world and misunderstanding the easiest, for we tend to hear what we think we are going to hear, and too often we make it so. In a lifetime one is lucky to meet six or seven people who know how to attend: the rest, some of whom believe themselves well-bred and highly educated, have for the most part fidgety ears; their span of attention is as short as the mating of a fly. They seem afraid to lend their mind to another’s thought, as if it would come back to them bruised and bent. This fear is of course fatal to sociability, and Lord Chesterfield was right when he wrote his son that the power of attention was the mark of a civilized man. The baby cannot attend, the savage and the boor will not. It is the boorishness of inattention that makes pleasant discussion turn into stupid repetitive argument, and that doubles the errors and mishaps of daily life.1
Before books and printing, the primary element in acquiring knowledge was listening. A “lecture” originally meant a “reading” from some precious manuscript. The reader read slowly and stopped to explain difficult passages to his listeners. The process has changed; reading is no doubt the primary element in acquiring knowledge, but listening remains the second most important element.
Why is listening, doubtless competing with the proper use of time for first among good study methods, the most difficult of the learning processes? The practices of seeing (reading), writing, and thinking are exercised within the person. But listening takes on the complexity of the listener having to coordinate their mental powers with an outside force—the person or thing to which the listener is listening. This demands the discipline of subjecting the mind of the listener to that of the speaker.
The second problem in learning to listen arises from lack of associated control. When you learn to read, your eyes control the speed with which you read. When you write there is actual physical control in your hand. In thinking, the analysis of thought travels at exactly the speed capacity of your mind. But when you begin to train yourself to be a good listener, you are faced with a difficulty not unlike that of trying to drive a car without brakes. You can think four times as fast as the average teacher can speak.
Only by demanding of yourself the most unswerving concentration and discipline can you hold your mind on the track of the speaker. This can be accomplished if the listener uses the free time to think around the topic—“listening between the lines” as it is sometimes called. It consists of anticipating the teacher’s next point, summarizing what has been said, questioning in silence the accuracy or importance of what is being taught, putting the teacher’s thoughts into one’s own words, and trying to discern the test or examination questions which will be formed from this material. If you can train yourself to do this you will: (1) save yourself much precious time by not having to read what has already been taught; and (2) you can give a more thoughtful and acceptable answer either in the give and take of class discussion or on a written test.
When you have learned to adjust your speed of thinking to the rate of a speaker, you have added two valuable elements to your character: (1) ability to discipline your mind to the present; and (2) you have made yourself a follower. Your mind performs in time, but it tries desperately to steer your thoughts into the pleasant, relaxing, reverie of past time; or toward the freedom of unlimited speculation and dreams which the future provides.
The classroom is the place to learn, and the classroom is the place to learn to listen. One of the most complimentary comments a teacher can make about you is, “Always attentive in class.” It carries with it many connotations: good classroom manners (posture, responsiveness, determined approach, etc.), a will to accomplish the job of learning, a desire to contribute your part, and above all an awareness that the classroom is an important place for you. If you can train yourself to listen, all these things become a natural part of you.
Learning to listen is learning to follow a leader. The student who listens is the student who learns, because listening, above everything else, makes the task of acquiring knowledge easier. The wise student listens with both their ears and eyes, hearing what the teacher is saying, and, at the same time, watching closely when the teacher is writing on the board or pointing on the map. When directions