Earlier this past week I wrote a little bit about my final preparations towards my exams and how they got me thinking about studying in general. I’ve written about the types of questions I prefer to give to my students (from the perspective of an instructor) before but I most recently wrote about studying from the perspective of the student. This is a continuation of that prior post (read it here). Today I will examin both of these methods in greater depth for their positives and negatives. The first basic option identified was a sort of power-skimming of the texts. … Continue reading →

Currently I’m hard at work on my dissertation. Dissertations are weird entities that force their writers into very clear decisions. The single point you intend to discuss, research, analyze and explore can be approached from a variety of different angles. The difficulty, of course, is that you must pick one angle (or, absent just one, a couple very specific angles). Don’t bite off more than you can chew comes to mind as an apt corollary. This type of work is massive in depth but not massive in breadth. You explore a limited thing in a specific way. While working on … Continue reading →