Hello, Socratica Friends. We’re here to help you be a GREAT STUDENT.
My name is Kimberly Hatch Harrison, and I’m the co-founder of Socratica.
You may know us best for our STEM content—
We make beautiful math, science, and programming videos.
But we also have created a kind of a META-series,
about HOW to learn. Because this is something
most people, sadly, are never taught. This causes issues even for gifted kids,
who typically COAST through school, everything comes easy,
until SUDDENLY they hit a brick wall— Sometimes it’s in high school,
sometimes it’s in college. You find yourself doing badly in a class,
and none of your old tricks are working. You’ve never had such a hard time
understanding anything, so You don’t know how to fix it.
Does this sound familiar?
This was absolutely my story.
School was really easy for me, until it wasn’t.
I only really started learning HOW to learn when I had to.
Starting in the 9th grade, I went to this VERY high-powered prep school—
a lot of it was taught at the college level— And I show up there with zero study skills.
But gradually, after making every possible mistake along the way,
I figured some things out. And then, when I went to college at Caltech,
I had to figure some more things out. And then I went to grad school at
Princeton, and there were even MORE challenges, so I leveled up again.
I actually started teaching while I was in grad school, and that meant I learned
even more about learning, being on the other side of the desk, helping someone ELSE learn.
After teaching about 500 people, you start to see
patterns—where students typically run into problems.
This is how I was able to write our study tips series, based on some hard-won knowledge.
The study tips videos have my best advice for specific problems, where you need to fix it NOW.
But if you’re interested in more of a long-term solution—
if you really want to level up, permanently, I wrote a book for you.
It’s called HOW TO BE A GREAT STUDENT. Each chapter explains
HOW I figured out how this all works. It’s full of embarrassing stories,
and screw-ups, and a few important insights. It’s available as an e-book and a paperback.
I’m also working on an audiobook, and I’ll let you know when that’s available.
You should know that your purchase helps support our work at Socratica.
I’m going to read the beginning to you,
so you can get a sense of it, and decide whether you need a copy for yourself. I think you do.
Are you ready? Let’s begin.
So. I wasn’t always a great student.
Don’t get me wrong, I went to all the best schools, and I got all A’s
for a long time—like 10 straight years. But it wasn’t because I was studious.
I was just a really smart kid. That was me getting by on cleverness.
This is the story of how I eventually hit a brick wall and had to learn—fast—how to actually study.
How did I do so well in school?
I read obsessively from an early age.
I also loved puzzles, and so I always did well on a certain kind of test. My whole life,
I was off the charts on all the standards like the Stanford-Binet, the ISEE, the SAT, the GRE.
With very little effort, correct answers would flash into my mind. It was easy for me to coast
until I found myself, at age 13, at one of the best college prep schools in the country.
For the first time in my life, I was asked to think about what I was studying.
I should put “studying” in quotes, because up until that time, I really didn’t do any proper
studying at all. All through grammar school, I sat in class, causing no trouble, trying to
avoid getting teased, and then wrote whatever I wanted on tests. Somehow I was always correct.
I showed up at my swanky, elite prep school freshman year
and was immediately in over my head.
I had NO idea how to manage my time, write essays, prepare for tests—none of it.
I was unprepared and ineffective in class, never knowing what was coming next.
I’d occasionally copy down what was on the board, but I never reviewed my notes.
I would turn in homework completed at the last minute.
I crammed for every test.
Don’t get me wrong—I wanted to do well, really I did. I’d sit for hours
staring at my textbooks, willing the information into my head.
Sometimes I’d do well; sometimes I wouldn’t.
I had no idea how to influence the whole experience.
For the first time I realized what it meant to struggle academically.
One of my teachers—God Bless You Eric Stelter—took pity on me.
He saw me trying to cram chemical formulas by brute force into my unpracticed brain the day
before a test in his class. I had no idea how long it would take me to study for the test,
or how to know if I was actually learning the material.
I thought it was pure chance how well I would do on his test the next day.
He took my chemistry book from me and flipped to the Practice Test at the end of the chapter
(why didn’t I know to look there?) and said these magic words:
“Only study what you DON’T know.”
Following his instructions, I took the practice test, got a 50%, and only reviewed the questions
I missed. I took the test again, and got about 85% correct. I reworked those last
tricky questions one more time, and the next day I got a 100% on the real test.
First technique learned: Only study what you don’t know, by using a practice test.
I call it Smart Test Prep.
I learned the rest of the tips in this book the hard way, by doing absolutely everything wrong.
I used the slowest, most painful, most inefficient ways to study,
until I figured out much better methods. These saw me through the rest of prep school and college.
I have 15 tips to share with you in this book.
If you read one chapter a day, you’ll become a Great Student in just a couple weeks.
Eric Stelter is no longer with us.
But I’m here to pay it forward. This is what I’ve learned about how to learn.