Style of Studying Letting Me Down. .

[Edin_Dzeko]

How I study right now:

[Biology]:
I'm trying to understand the concepts so I've been trying really hard to avoid memorization at all costs. But I'm struggling. I spend hours reading it but I don't really understand it that well. I've been stuck on evolution and natural selection. Not sure if it's the language of the text or not. I'm not really getting it.

[Chemistry]:
I understand that it's math based and adequately practicing math problems are to my own advantage. But as said above, I am trying to learn the concepts so I'm not trying to do all math, math without understanding. I spend hours but I feel like I'm not getting anywhere.

What should I do? For the Bio, do you think it will be helpful if I first learned vocabulary words then tackled the chapter(s)? What about the Chemistry?

I'm really worried because when school opens, if I keep studying at this rate, I'm scared about not being able to keep up. Help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Ryker]

Well, I think you shouldn't actively try and avoid memorization, but rather pursue it. Just not in a way that you only focus on memorizing facts, but so that you also understand connections between them. You need to know facts, so that you can then build you understanding on it. And if just focusing on concepts isn't enough to internalize those facts, then you just need some rote memorization to build the foundations that will then later on help you in being able to connect facts into larger structures. Don't be scared of memorization, as even in maths you need to know definitions in order to be creative, prove theorems etc.

You can't understand things without first knowing the facts, while on the other hand just knowing the facts doesn't necessarily lead to a deeper understanding of the material.

I don't really get what you mean by vocabulary words, though.

 

[Edin_Dzeko]

Well, I think you shouldn't actively try and avoid memorization, but rather pursue it. Just not in a way that you only focus on memorizing facts, but so that you also understand connections between them. You need to know facts, so that you can then build you understanding on it. And if just focusing on concepts isn't enough to internalize those facts, then you just need some rote memorization to build the foundations that will then later on help you in being able to connect facts into larger structures. Don't be scared of memorization, as even in maths you need to know definitions in order to be creative, prove theorems etc.

You can't understand things without first knowing the facts, while on the other hand just knowing the facts doesn't necessarily lead to a deeper understanding of the material.

I don't really get what you mean by vocabulary words, though.

Alright thanks. I'll try that out and see how it goes.

 

[iRaid]

These are the reasons I HATE chemistry and biology (biology more than chemistry)

 

[Edin_Dzeko]

@ iRaid: Lol. When school begins in the fall, it will be my third attempt at trying to pass Chemistry.

After these 2 weeks I don't even think I've hit the surface of evolution / natural selection yet. I really don't understand it well. They say the best way to tell if you really understand something is if you can re-teach it to somebody. Right now, I couldn't teach anyone anything about this despite how many hours I've been pouring into this for some weeks now. I'm reading INTRO TO EVOLUTION articles online before I go back to the textbook. Made me question my intelligence early on, but now I've come to accept that everyone learns differently and at their own pace. I've never really had to bust my brains to focus and study so this whole sitting down studying thing is new to me. I'm just breaking into the habit and I really feel like after this, the next subjects will be much easier and flow faster.

So I'm not giving up though. I really hope to understand before school starts. But I feel like considering that I'm trying to teach it to m