Dear friend most of us have to study in this world mostly in the hope to make good money or to hunt a good job in the future. Many a times we mismanage our studies and we pay a great cost in future due to this mismanagement. I hold an M.Sc. degree in economics from an international university. To study I used to read the course material again and again and I was able to read 30 pages per hour and I could never cross this limit. Another technique I used was that I read the material by monitoring that am I getting the message completely or not? I called this method of reading as “message collection”. Since my childhood I was against memorization so I never memorized anything in my whole life except mathematical and statistical formulas and formulas always gave me tough time. Actually it was not that I could not memorize instead the problem was that I believed that memorization is just a useless activity and I just refused to memorize because of my philosophy that memorization is redundant and unnecessary. Actually I always focused on learning instead of memorization. I learned things well and in examination I just wrote whatever I knew about a certain question. I just thought that my respected teacher is sitting in front of me and I am just talking to her. I enjoyed it very much and got good grades also. Most of us teach our kids how to memorize but we should instead teach them creative writing so that they can learn freely to express themselves. My son also feels difficulty in memorization and he wants to write his mind and he wants to express himself with freedom. He does not want to confine his thoughts in words instead he wants to express freely by using words and I like this genetic coding! Let’s see how I handled an examination paper. First of all I used to read the question paper then I used to allocate time to each part of all questions. The point to note is that fear and anxiety always hinder the performance of our minds so for a better performance we should control our fear and anxiety level. Most common fear in exam is that we fear that we will run out of time and we will miss some question or we will miss some part of a question. I used to solve this problem in the very beginning. I just reserved 10 minutes which I used for allocating time to each part of all questions. First of all I used to count all the parts and then I estimated the time needed to complete each part and I did it very quickly and swiftly. When you know your subject it is easy to roughly estimate that how much time you need to complete some question. So I wrote the number of minutes against each part and then I used to start writing the answers and I never ran out of time and I never missed a question in my exams instead I completed my paper before time or on-time. I used to be very direct and to the point. I used to be extremely brief and it was my record that I never requested extra answer sheet. Once one part was there to be done but my answer-sheet got full but I solved that part on the back of the answer-sheet. I remember that, that paper was of “American Economy”. So if you want to get rid of excessive fear and anxiety just wisely allocate time in the very beginning of your examination. To be to the point I used to write answers in the form of numbered points. Test anxiety is common to almost all students. Before your exam you may consult a psychiatrist and through consultation you may decide to take a very low dose of some anti-anxiety tablet before each test. Another choice is that you get a full body-massage before each paper or at least massage your body with an electric massager. This will reduce anxiety and it will optimise the performance of your mind. Gas in your stomach also bring anxiety so you should eat light food before each test. Drinking some good fizzy drink also reduces gas in your stomach. Moreover ajwain also keeps gas and anxiety from yourself. You may swallow a small amount of ajwain with water because chewing it is difficult because it is quite bitter in taste. Let’s talk a bit about classroom activities. For me attending the class was just boring and time wasting because teachers were not much good. My success all depended on written or printed material. I was forced to attend classes because 80% class attendance was required to sit any exam so I had to make sure that my attendance was above 80%. We realized after one year that class notes were extremely important for exam success. It was quite difficult to take word-by-word notes in the class. What we did was that we pooled money and hired a stenographer who converted the class lectures into printed material and the whole class benefitted and we just calmly used to listen to the lectures. Sometimes we recorded the lectures and then we converted audio files to text files by using free online services. It was a bit less costly than hiring a stenographer. Study creatively friend but always make sure that you are studying nothing but what you love! Thank You & Have a Good Day! Pray for Me that I Get Out of My Troubles. You will find me Thankful! :-):
