inconceivable

[inconceivable]

How to Study Like a Harvard Student

[yhbgk]

Taken from Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld, daughter of the Tiger Mother

Preliminary Steps

1. Choose classes that interest you. That way studying doesn’t feel like slave labor. If you don’t want to learn, then I can’t help you.
2. Make some friends. See steps 12, 13, 23, 24.

General Principles

3. Study less, but study better.
4. Avoid Autopilot Brain at all costs.
5. Vague is bad. Vague is a waste of your time.
6. Write it down.
7. Suck it up, buckle down, get it done.

Plan of Attack Phase I: Class

8. Show up. Everything will make a lot more sense that way, and you will save yourself a lot of time in the long run.
9. Take notes by hand. I don’t know the science behind it, but doing anything by hand is a way of carving it into your memory. Also, if you get bored you will doodle, which is still a thousand times better than ending up on stumbleupon or something.

Phase II: Study Time

10. Get out of the library. The sheer fact of being in a library doesn’t fill you with knowledge. Eight hours of Facebooking in the library is still eight hours of Facebooking. Also, people who bring food and blankets to the library and just stay there during finals week start to smell weird. Go home and bathe. You can quiz yourself while you wash your hair.
11. Do a little every day, but don’t let it be your whole day. “This afternoon, I will read a chapter of something and do half a problem set. Then, I will watch an episode of South Park and go to the gym” ALWAYS BEATS “Starting right now, I am going to read as much as I possibly can…oh wow, now it’s midnight, I’m on page five, and my room reeks of ramen and dysfunction.”
12. Give yourself incentive. There’s nothing worse than a gaping abyss of study time. If you know you’re going out in six hours, you’re more likely to get something done.
13. Allow friends to confiscate your phone when they catch you playing Angry Birds. Oh and if you think you need a break, you probably don’t.

Phase III: Assignments

14. Stop highlighting. Underlining is supposed to keep you focused, but it’s actually a one-way ticket to Autopilot Brain. You zone out, look down, and suddenly you have five pages of neon green that you don’t remember reading. Write notes in the margins instead.
15. Do all your own work. You get nothing out of copying a problem set. It’s also shady.
16. Read as much as you can. No way around it. Stop trying to cheat with Sparknotes.
17. Be a smart reader, not a robot (lol). Ask yourself: What is the author trying to prove? What is the logical progression of the argument? You can usually answer these questions by reading the introduction and conclusion of every chapter. Then, pick any two examples/anecdotes and commit them to memory (write them down). They will help you reconstruct the author’s argument later on.
18. Don’t read everything, but understand everything that you read. Better to have a deep understanding of a limited amount of material, than to have a vague understanding of an entire course. Once again: Vague is bad. Vague is a waste of your time.
19. Bullet points. For essays, summarizing, everything.

Phase IV: Reading Period (Review Week)

20. Once again: do not move into the library. Eat, sleep, and bathe.
21. If you don’t understand it, it will definitely be on the exam. Solution: textbooks; the internet.
22. Do all the practice problems. This one is totally tiger mom.
23. People are often contemptuous of rote learning. Newsflash: even at great intellectual bastions like Harvard, you will be required to memorize formulas, names and dates. To memorize effectively: stop reading your list over and over again. It doesn’t work. Say it out loud, write it down. Remember how you made friends? Have them quiz you, then return the favor.
24. Again with the friends: ask them to listen while you explain a difficult concept to them. This forces you to articulate your understanding. Remember, vague is bad.
25. Go for the big picture. Try to figure out where a specific concept fits into the course as a whole. This will help you tap into Big Themes – every class has Big Themes – which will streamline what you need to know. You can learn a million facts, but until you understand how they fit together, you’re missing the point.

Phase V: Exam Day
26. Crush exam. Get A.

[inconceivable]

[postmarq]

College Packing Index Cards:
Use these index cards as a college packing guide — you don’t have to bring everything on the list.

[inconceivable]

[animalaspects]

Here are some wonderful facts about Sea World’s orcas!

• The average lifespan of wild orcas ranges from 30-50 years, although some females can easily make it past 80 (a wild orca named J2 or ‘Granny’ is 103 this year!). The lifespan of a Sea World orca is around 25 years, the median age being 9. But at least they put on a good show!
• Don’t worry, collapsed dorsal fins are a common condition, although in the wild only sick or injured orcas have collapsed dorsal fins. All of Sea World’s males and some females have it, it makes them look unique! 
• The size of Sea World’s tanks compared to an orca is about the same as a human to a bathtub. Lot’s of room to stretch and move!
• Wild orcas swim 100+ miles a day, they would have to swim around their tank 1,400+ times a day to achieve that. But that seems like a lot of work, and you may see the animals hanging out near the surface of the water or on the bottoms of their tanks for hours. That’s a lot more relaxing than swimming all those miles!
• Sea World gives their orcas a Valium-like drug to stop the whales from acting aggressively towards each other and to numb their minds from their vastly uninteresting concrete tanks. Buying a ticket to Sea World is an excellent way to help them pay for these drugs that they pump their animals full with!
• Many captive orcas show abnormal behaviors like head bobbing, chewing on concrete, and self mutilation by banging their heads into the side of the tank. Obviously just temper-tantrums! Silly things.
• In the wild, there has been only one orca attack. Bad orca! While in captivity, there have been over 100 attacks and 4 deaths. These animals just need more training, it couldn’t possibly be related to their confinement! 
• Food is used as reinforcement for tricks. Do a trick, get your dinner. Don’t want to do a trick? I guess you don’t eat tonight you stubborn thing! 

See? Sea World isn’t as bad as people make it out to be! Oh, one more fact: for every $1,000,000 Sea World makes, about $600 goes into conservation efforts (about $0.5 a ticket). I’m so glad they care about conservation of the ocean! Amazing work!

Sources: (x) (x) (x) (x)

If you haven’t realized it yet, this post is 100% sarcastic. It should be obvious, but not everyone understands sarcasm…

[animalaspects]

Please don’t let this die

[inconceivable]

[dearnonacepeople]

So let me get this straight, in Monopoly if you give one player more money to start out it’s “unfair” but if you do it in real life it’s “capitalism”? 

[carriagelamp]

You know what, I’m going to tell you guys a story.

In my Sociology class a few semesters ago, our prof had us break off into groups and, much to our naive joy, began distributing Monopoly boards! We had no idea what was going on but yay! Games! Of course, once our group, and a number of others, got the board we began to work at setting up and distributing the money…

until suddenly our prof told us to put the money down and pick up the dice.

“Roll the dice and sort yourselves from highest to lowest,” our teacher commanded.  "Now, the highest number is the upper class. The next one is upper middle class.  The next two or three are middle class. The last person is in poverty.“

Well, as the person who rolled a two this was startling and not wholly welcome news.

From that point the game changed entirely. We had to hand out the money so that the “upper class” had this fucking mountain, and then less for upper middle, even less for middle, and I didn’t get any triple digit bills. We would all collect different amounts from passing go as well.

The biggest change though? Going to jail. Upper class didn’t. Period. Upper middle class could go but they only had to stay for one turn or they could immediately pay their way out. Middle class had some pretty easy guidelines for when they could pay to get out. As lower class, it was really easy for me to wind up in jail and REALLY hard to get out. But since I was working with so little money when everyone else had so much I was in jail all the time because there was no “game over”.  If I couldn’t pay I had to go to jail for a certain period of time. I had to take out loans with interest I could never pay back just to get out only to wind up back in it again, rolling dice turn after turn hoping to be able to get out.

It was simultaneously the most enlightening and most awful game I had ever played. I was bored and frustrated and a little terrified about it all. And it wasn’t only me. I would never win, I sort of accepted this, but it was amazing how the middle classes reacted as well.  They were stressed. Because they were always that close to either being able to one-up the upper class or from crashing into poverty with me. They had to fight constantly just to stay in the middle.

(I should also mention that the upper class player in one group felt so bad for the lower income players that they ended up overhauling their entire game and creating a “socialist” society instead. I’m not sure how our teacher felt about that one.)

[kierongillen]

Worth stressing this is entirely in the spirit of the original designer’s aims for Monopoly. 

Monopoly’s  original form of The Landlord Game which was explicitly designed to teach people about the unfairness of rent systems. To quote from the wikipedia entry, just as it’s the easiest source to hand…

Magie designed the game to be a “practical demonstration of the present system of land grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences”.^[2] She based the game on the economic principles of Georgism, a system proposed byHenry George, with the object of demonstrating how rents enrich property owners and impoverish tenants. She knew that some people could find it hard to understand why this happened and what might be done about it, and she thought that if Georgist ideas were put into the concrete form of a game, they might be easier to demonstrate.

When the usual suspects start making “don’t bring politics into games” noises, I roll my eyes pretty hard. They have no idea of the history of the form.

[she-minions]

And then the Parker Brothers pushed her out and stole the game thereby demonstrating exactly what capitalism is

[inconceivable]

[boneyardchamp]

Your professor will not be happy with you if he says the Stanford Prison Experiment shows human nature and you say it shows the nature of white middle class college-aged boys.

Like he will not be happy at all.

[cannon-fannon]

For real though. That experiment. Scary shit.

[condemnedtorocknroll]

someone brought that up once and my teacher (can’t remember which one) was like

no

nonono

[hollowedskin]

This reminds me of a discussion that I read once which said Lord of the Flies would have turned out a hell of a lot differently if it was a private school of young girls (who are expected to be responsible and selfless instead), or a public school where the children weren’t all from an inherently entitled, emotionally stunted social class (studies have shown that people in lower socioeconomic classes show more compassion for others).

Or that the same premise with children raised in a different culture than the toxic and opressive British Empire and it’s emphasis on social hierarchy and personal wealth and status.

And that what we perceive as the unchangable truth deep inside humanity because of things like Lord of the Flies and the Stanford Prison Experiment, is just the base truths about what happens when you remove any accountabilty controlling one social group with an overwhelming sense of entitlement and an inability to feel compassion.

[condemnedtorocknroll]

^could never have put it better. bolded for emphasis.

[inconceivable]

There is a fundamental reason why we look at the sky with wonder and longing—for the same reason that we stand, hour after hour, gazing at the distant swell of the open ocean. There is something like an ancient wisdom, encoded and tucked away in our DNA, that knows its point of origin as surely as a salmon knows its creek. Intellectually, we may not want to return there, but the genes know, and long for their origins—their home in the salty depths. But if the seas are our immediate source, the penultimate source is certainly the heavens… The spectacular truth is—and this is something that your DNA has known all along—the very atoms of your body—the iron, calcium, phosphorus, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and on and on—were initially forged in long-dead stars. This is why, when you stand outside under a moonless, country sky, you feel some ineffable tugging at your innards. We are star stuff. Keep looking up.

Neil de Grasse Tyson (via theknightlyqueen)

[inconceivable]

[wigglesfangirl]

This makes me so mad. Like honestly, people commenting that she’s “metallic” are white people trying to defend this. The girl is painted a solid brown color, I don’t care how much glitter they packed on. I’ve defended the Kardashians for a long time that they get to do what they want, but this is too much. This on top of the dreads. “What I wish I looked like all the time” really? You wish you looked black all the time? Then where were you during Hands Up Don’t Shoot? Or any racial injustices really? She could’ve painted herself a pale metallic color, but she didn’t. Kylie is doing blatant black face and as an actual woman of color, I am deeply offended.

[inconceivable]

[nativepeopleproblems]

I’m gonna do a little explaining of what I love about pesach for my non-Jewish friends. The whole purpose of pesach, is to retell a story of our suffering, celebrate that we are no longer in that position, and then acknowledge that as long as any group is oppressed, we shall never truly be free. This, to me, is quintessential Judaism. This is why Jews have always been a major part of civil rights movements, of social justice movements. We as a people cannot be free until we have made sure everyone else is.

[inconceivable]

[inconceivable]