Hey guys!
In today's video, I'll be flipping through my precalculus notes from this past school year,
and in the voiceover, I'll be giving you some tips,
specifically based on what I learned in precalc, but this applies to pretty much every math class.
To begin with, since my how to take math notes video was tragically removed,
I'd like to explain a bit about how exactly these notes work.
So originally I used a black pen for
information and I would use a grey pen for example questions
as you can probably see on the screen right now.
And the highlighter colors
I used are pretty much arbitrary.
There is no color coding system or anything, although next year
I will probably change that and use the same color for each chapter.
Towards the end of the year, which you'll see later on in this flip through video,
I stopped using the grey pen because it ran out of ink and I found that
visually separating the examples wasn't that important to me. It didn't help me that much.
And now for the tips part of this voice over video thing.
First of all,
the best way to study is first to make sure you understand any concepts and have any formulas memorized,
and then just keep doing practice problems.
Simply looking over your notes is not enough to study for math because you don't just need to know the information,
you have to actually be able to apply it and solve the problem.
So you can get practice problems from a website called Kuta Software that I used a lot,
and also your textbook.
Not all textbooks have answers in the back, so you can use Slater to check your answers,
and that's something else that's really important. When you do your practice problems,
you need to know what you got wrong and identify where you made the mistake
and make a mental note of that so you can avoid doing that in the future, especially on assessments like quizzes and tests.
And speaking of quizzes and tests, make sure you check your answers whenever you can and
it helps to do a method of solving the problem but in reverse.
For example, if you found the critical points of a conic section based on its equation,
you can write the equation of a conic section based on those critical points and see if they match up.
Or more obviously, if you solved an equation, just substitute your solution back in.
Tip #3 would be when you're doing your homework, avoid using your calculator whenever possible
because on quizzes and tests, a lot of the time you can't use a calculator.
So I know it saves a lot of time to use a calculator on your homework,
but I think homework should be treated as a way of studying for tests and quizzes through practice.
So if you practice doing your operations really quickly and accurately,
it will overall help you avoid making dumb mistakes on a test.
I know it sucks,
but I really recommend, for example, doing unit circle angles,
doing those trig values by hand,
or memorizing exponents like two to the tenth, or something like that.
It really helps speed you up on tests
because you either don't really have to think about it when you're doing non-calculator tests,
or on a calculator test, you don't have to waste time typing in your calculator.
And on the topic of making dumb mistakes, I think the best strategy for taking assessments
is to do them carefully.
Not slowly, but carefully the first time around to try to avoid having to change your answer when you're rechecking it
because overall, it would take more time to do it wrong and then redo it
than to just be more careful the first time around.
I hope you found this video helpful, and if you'd like to see more like this, I'll link some more note flip through videos on-screen.
I upload new videos every Monday and Friday
and you can check out my tumblr and instagram which are @studyquill and linked in the description
See you next time!