Distraction

Distraction. We all know it. We all love it. It's that old pal that lures us away from studying for that exam. It's that website that absorbs 3 hours of our time when we're trying to research a paper. It's that thing that leads to sleepless night and OUCH grades on our work. If only we had had more time!

 You see, I know a little bit about distraction. As a girl who's dealt with AD.....HEY LOOK! THERE'S A CHICKEN! Excuse me. As a girl who's dealt with ADD for her entire life and only recently been put on meds, I had to learn some skills in order to survive out there in the academic jungle.

 I get it. Holiday Fever abounds and everyone is burned out with their classes. The downside is that the latter half of the semester is your most workload heavy portion. Copping out now could easily unravel all of that hard work you put in at the beginning. So here's a little collection of pointers to stay focused and get the job done.

** note, this blog has taken a week to complete because I keep getting, you guessed it, DISTRACTED!!

1.      Time of day. Learn when the best time of the day is best for you to study and easiest to focus. My best time is early morning or late at night, but it’s different from person to person. Find a good, quiet place for yourself. If you want to study in your dorm, take note of when it's the calmest and the fewest people will be around to distract you.

2.      Avoid the internet and your cell phone. It’s best just to turn off the computer (or at least the internet) and put your cell phone in a drawer to avoid temptation.

3.      Write by hand, redraw figures, or read in depth. The more senses you can involve, the more likely you’ll be able to hold your attention.

4.      Have everything you need (including snacks) nearby. This will keep you from moseying over to the fridge…and to the tv…and to your roommate….etc.

5.      Find a good study spot. Avoid lots of people, noise, televisions and other things that might detract your attention.

6.      Develop realistic goals. Think about how much you want to have accomplished in 30 minutes or an hour and then get to work on making those goals happen.

7.      Take a break! Every hour, try to take 10 minutes to get up, walk around, text your friend, etc. to release that built up desire to be doing something else. As long as you keep reminding yourself that you can do whatever is nagging the back of your mind after your hour stint, it should help you build endurance.

8.      Work in groups of 4 or less. Anymore, and the likelihood that studying will become socializing increases. Working in small groups allows you to have someone to discuss concepts to check for understanding and develop learning hooks with one another.

9.      Work out. Increasing blood flow to the brain by doing a little cardio can help improve one’s brain function. This is one of the best things for a non-medicated ADD person.

10. Caffeine. Although this is a bit controversial, caffeine is a stimulant that may boost your brain’s function. However, too much may cause you to get the jitters, so be cautious of your intake. For a person with ADD or ADHD, caffeine will actually calm his or her mind down to allow them to focus on one thing at a time.

Thankful...

I hope you have all had a jolly old turkey day and are speedily recovering from your tryptophan stupor. Although this is a bit after the fact, I am thankful to work in the most interesting subject on the planet, and I am thankful to be able to share my fascination with you. Hopefully, something that you find on these recent research reports below will renew your wonder for the life sciences and fuel you to push on just a bit longer. Enjoy!  (Cue Louie Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World .)

Probiotics in yogurt cheered up lab mice

Parasites may be the reason humans are the robust creatures we are (sans autoimmune diseases)

Could certain frequencies of light be used as a possible cancer treatment?

Human body heat used to heat Parisian apartment complex

Flirtatious Pine Trees

Air Pollution and Blood Pressure

Greenest Skyscraper ever and the World Trade Center

Green Architecture: Live-in power plant

Living conditions as a child imprint on DNA   

Fist-sized, single-celled creatures found in Pacific Ocean

Neurons grown from skin cells give clues about Autism

“Broken Heart Syndrome”

Synthetic blood in the near future

Flocking Starlings

T-Rexes and their big butts

cervical cancer cells

Climate change causing shrinking effect in animals

Antibiotic resistance spreading across Europe

Giving it the Old College Try

Sheldon from “The Big Bang Theory” is probably one of my all-time favorite TV characters; and until I watched the show, I had never heard the expression “Give it the old college try!”  Thanks to Google, I was able to look up what it actually means, which is “Give it your best shot and achieve something.”

How applicable!

Midterm grades are submitted, students are howling, parents are hounding, and everyone is feeling a bit on edge. Meanwhile, I figured it’s time to post another blog. (This time I’ll make it shorter and add pictures so people spend more than 30 seconds on the page.)

Now that the honeymoon stage of college life is over, it’s time to pay the band. Yes, professors are actually grading your butt; and no, they are not afraid to drop you on it. From here you have two options:

1)      Withdraw.

2)      Give it the old college try!

Although withdrawing may seem to be the easier solution, keep in mind that GCSU’s policy permits only five withdrawals; and if you’re withdrawing from a science lecture and a lab, you’re using two of those. Not completing a class could also mess up any financial aid you are receiving.  So unless your case is hopeless and your only option for passing the class is to figure out a way to time travel, you’re better off going with option #2.

Giving it the old college try will require you to pull out all the stops.  For sure you’ve realized that this is not 13^th grade and that you will need to study more than 30 minutes the night before the exam to make an A.  This will entail self-discipline on your part; therefore, at some point you will need to choose studying over going out in search of hot babes or watching a marathon on “America’s Most Haunted.” Try the “lecture the wall” technique I mentioned in an earlier blog.  Form a study group and create mnemonic devices and study questions to review together.  Actually talk to your professor.  Reflect on how this class might be important to your future successes, and make it relevant to your life.  Find a place to study, distraction-free.  And don’t forget the Learning Center in A&S and supplemental instructors. These are no longer remedial options; these are critical tools that you’ll need for success in college.

Instructors do not want to see their students sink, and yet none of them hand out free A’s either.  Play hard, but work hard too, and achieve something while you’re at it.  If you were incapable of the workload our professors hand out, our admissions office wouldn’t have let you through the door.  You are here to make something out of yourself, so do it.  Give it the old college try; we’re all rooting for you.

Study Tip #1: Einstein and Your Grandma

I love a good quote.  This little jewel from Albert Einstein is the BEST study tip in my arsenal.

“You do not really understand something until you can explain it to your grandmother.”  ~Albert Einstein

Interestingly enough, both of his grandmothers died before Einstein was ten, so I wonder whom he called when he wanted to detail the inner workings of the atom bomb?  If he had called my Mema, she would have tried to deafen him with a whistle she kept for prank callers and then slammed the phone down.  But I digress…

Am I recommending that you call Granny and lecture her on the Krebs Cycle? Absolutely not. You will be taken out of her will.  Instead, imagine yourself as the teacher about to present the material you’re studying to your class.  How would you prepare? Let me give you a hint from the other side of the desk:  You read it, you roll it around in your head, and then you practice delivery.  
In my personal experience, nothing forces me to learn something more clearly and in depth than when I teach it because the last thing I want to do is stand up in front of you guys and look like a moron. When I read through the material, simply recognizing key facts and knowing a gamut of vocabulary words isn’t going to cut it. I need to be comfortable in my knowledge if I am to explain complex mechanisms, give colorful examples, and delve into the hows and whys and whens that are associated with biological processes. The better I am able to break it down for my students’ understanding, the more my students can learn and comprehend.  Higher level of thinking for collegiate sciences requires one to go way beyond memorizing facts and regurgitating data—that’s  high school stuff.  Now you’ve got to understand this information and apply it to the natural world.  It’s like comparing chimpanzees with humans. Chimpanzees have photographic memories that are much more impressive than humans’; they can memorize numbers and patterns in a split second.  However, you don’t see chimpanzees using this know-how to launch rocket ships.  Comprehension is not only beneficial for success in your current classes, but in the ones down the road as well. Impressive skyscrapers are not constructed in quick sand. Everything in math and science will be based on this early material.

If I had a vacation day for every time I’ve heard a student say,  ”I thought I understood it, but then I got the test and I went blank!” I might not have to go to work again until my retirement party.  Gary North pointed out a cold, hard truth in his series of study skills for high school students: “Most students can’t psychologically face the reality of their own ignorance until they are forced to during an exam. This is the wrong time to discover that you don’t know the material.” So how can you find out beforehand? Lecture to the wall.

1)      Find a quiet, isolated place.
2)      Read a section or page out of your text book and then close it.
3)      Summarize in your own words what you have just read and say it out loud. In other words, lecture to your wall. Teach it in your closet. Explain it to your grandmother. Whatever.
4)      If you got it, move on to the next section. If you couldn’t remember anything, go back and try again. If you thought that section was confusing, then you should spend more time on that section’s material, and less on the stuff that already clicked.

Even though it’s an easy enough concept to follow; it’s pretty challenging, psychologically speaking. It feels pretty awkward when you first start, honestly.  So why am I telling you to participate in such craziness?  Because reading, summarizing information in your own words, vocalizing these ideas, and listening to yourself speak will activate many different parts of your brain.  The more you can utilize these different areas during the learning process, the easier it is to recall the information when you need it. In addition, it’s been well documented in many studies on learning that the more senses you use while studying, the more likely you are to retain the information. This is why it helps some people to rewrite their notes so that they can “touch and move” with the words.  It is also why others like to eat peppermint or chew certain flavors of gum while they study and when they take the test.  This creates a link between the taste and smell of the candy and the information amassed while studying.  Your mind is working full steam ahead by filtering the fluff, grabbing the good stuff, and twisting it all around in a way that you can understand it best—it’s tailor-made for you! If you practice all of this while you’re studying and I hooked you up to a PET scan device (PET is a medical imaging technique that measures brain activity and projects images in color)—your cerebrum would look more like a Christmas tree than a wrinkly pinkish mass. Your memory hooks will resemble something that could pull in Moby Dick instead of a little Nemo.  Not to mention the time you’ll save from staring at a textbook and merely looking at the words while thinking about lasagna or something.

Try it. I dare you…one subject per day. You will become an academic BEAST. The more time you give it, the better it will work (in other words, don’t expect great results in only 10 minutes before your test).  It’s going to rock your world, I guarantee.

Homework and Papers and Tests! Oh My!!

Welcome to the riveting world of science, and mathematics, and technology, and some of the arts, and a dash of history and politics, and everything else you can possibly cram into the widely encompassing word B-I-O-L-O-G-Y.  Who knew there was so much to it?  Not to mention the other fun (and the not so fun) things associated with the college life.  As you’ve figured out by now, it ain’t all easy.  Is it rewarding and worth the struggle?  As Sarah Palin would say, “You betcha!”   But is it easy?  Let’s be for real; it’s not even close.

As I peer into my metaphorical crystal ball, I would say that 98% of you have felt your head roaring like a tornado in Kansas at least once already this semester.  If you haven’t felt it yet, just wait. It’s coming. I’d even wager that most of you have even had a panic-stricken, near myocardial-infarction feeling of, “What is wrong with me? I made straight A’s in high school and I NEVER cracked a book! Now I am actually studying and barely scraping by! ” Am I right? Now, before you plummet into an abyss of calc-based equations, papers on Flannery O’Conner’s influence, and all of the tenets of the cell theory, allow me to calm your fevered mind by informing you that this feeling is absolutely normal. And the even better news is this:  there are relatively easy things you can do to master your college courses.  Studies have shown that some of the methods I will blog about can raise your grade a whole letter if you practice them faithfully.  However, in order for them to work, you must do two fairly difficult things:  swallow your pride, and learn some self-discipline.

Thomas Szasz, a psychiatrist and academic, observed:  “Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily.”  Yikes!

But I like the way Winston Churchill says it best, “I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.” We enjoy quenching our curiosity, but it loses its charm when a 3^rd party determines what we should be curious about and how well (on an academic scale) we “quenched” it.  Did I hear an Amen?

However, to conclude the quotation portion, keep this adage in mind above the others:  “What we obtain too cheaply, we esteem too lightly.” If your post-college goal is valuable, you must fight for it or someone else will. Nobody gets a philosophical free lunch; you will get out of your college experience what you put into it.  The more effort you apply now, the more rewards you’ll reap as you move towards your ultimate destination.

So how do you know you can trust me? I know because I was a biology student at Georgia College not so long ago for both my bachelor’s and master’s degrees, not to mention all my biology friends who were mired in there with me.  Then—for the proof of the pudding—I taught freshmen biology students who had the same issues that I and my comrades had experienced years ago.  From a teacher’s perspective, I witnessed the methods that worked (and bombed) for the typical Kathy Kollege.  Not only did we all survive (at least the ones willing to work), but we thrived!  And now, I want to pass on some of that sweet, sound college-survival wisdom on to you.  After all, I work for the Center for Student Success. It’s my business to make sure you are well equipped to grab the collegiate bull by the…well, whatever appendage you feel comfortable grabbing.  Let’s begin, shall we?