Learning Tips for Students

A lot of things have changed. Today's children have bigger syllabi to learn. Now, learning experts and teachers ask students to read faster and grasp important points.

Here are a few tips for students who have a lot to learn, but very little time.

Make a Timetable

Your timetable should have separate time for eating, playing games, exercise, reading newspaper and study materials. You should not only make a timetable, but also should stick to it.

Give priority to leisure and games in the afternoon, but separate early morning time for studies. Make sure you read all the class notes before you go to bed.

While allotting time to different subjects, allot more time to difficult subjects. You need only less time for the subjects that are easier for you to learn.

Taking Notes

Taking notes is an important part of learning. You need to take lecture notes (classroom notes) and notes from your textbook.

- Go through the lessons on the day before your teacher would teach it in the class. This gives you an idea of what to expect.

- Write down important ideas as bullet points. One word or a phrase is enough to include an idea.

- Give prominence to important ideas by underlining them in your notes.

- Leave lot of space in each face of paper. This will help you add new points later.

- Organize your notes into separate files. Each subject should have a different file. Label the outer page of the file with name of the subject and your teacher. You should also neatly organize each file according to chapters and topics.

- Read the notes (important points) in the night, before going to bed. Read only once. This helps you memorize the lessons clearly.

- While taking notes from a book, label the name of the book and author. Also, note the page number next to your notes. It makes it easy for you to refer to the book three or six months later.

Reading Techniques

You need to read fast and grasp more things. Here are some pointers to fast reading.

- Note the name of the book and its author in the reading log.

- Take a quick look from cover to cover to identify the important chapters.

- Take a quick look over the chapter, identify the important points, and note them down.

- Read the lesson fast. To increase the speed of learning, pass your eyes through the top of the letters and not through the centre. For example, while reading, pass your eyes through the area where the dot above the letter i appears and not through the loop of the letter o.

- Don't take notes while reading.

- Don't go back to read a word or a sentence. If you don't get the idea of the subject, you can come back to the sentence after you finish reading the chapter. Never look up a dictionary while in the middle of reading a chapter. Refer dictionary only if you don't automatically understand the meaning of a word after finishing the paragraph and the chapter.

- Note down the points you remember. Now check if you have taken all the important points, with another fast reading.

How to increase memory

Try to understand completely what you read or hear.

Repeat what you hear or read in your mind.

Make notes of what you learn at school or read from books. A single word can help you remember a whole idea.

Give number to the points

Don't try to bring to memory all the things you have learned. Learn the technique of bringing to memory one thing at a time.

How to increase concentration

Mental concentration is important to memory and better learning.

Stick to your reading timetable. You should separate a specific place and specific time of the day for reading.

Sit erect. It increases your concentration.

Don't allow disturbances like phone calls, music etc while reading.

Concentrate on the lessons you read. Don't think about the next book you have to read while you are reading a book. A better way is to make an order of the books and lessons to read and arrange them in order before you start reading.

Immediately after reading a paragraph, try to recall the idea from that paragraph. This helps you concentrate more on your reading.

Ideal conditions for reading/learning

A silent location that you don't use for sleeping, eating or leisure purposes is the most ideal condition for reading.

Install a fluorescent tube light in the reading room. This helps mild light to fall evenly all over the room. Don't sit in the darkness while reading. If you use table lamp, arrange it towards your left if you are a right-hander.

Arrange the papers, pencils, boards and books on the table before you start reading.

Never try to read while you are tired or ill.

Eat healthy food rich in carbohydrates, proteins and fibres. Replace fast food, pizza, burger, chocolates, ice creams, etc with fresh fruits, whole grain food items (like chapatti), milk, fruit juices, etc.

Exercise daily. Swimming, cycling and jogging are good for students. Practise yoga. It increases concentration and willpower.

Don't watch TV. Instead, play some games in the outdoors. While TV makes you dumb, the games make you smarter.

Read lot of books. Read classic stories, fables (like Aesop fables, Panchatantra stories, etc), etc. Don't spend too much time on comic cartoons.

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Courtesy http://www.streetdirectory.com

Textbooks published by the Department of School Education, Govt. of Tamil Nadu are hosted in this website for viewing purpose.

http://www.textbooksonline.tn.nic.in/

http://dge.tn.gov.in/schoolsyllabus/

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Boosting bacteria in drinking water may improve health

Every gallon of purified drinking water is home to hundreds of millions of bacteria. Water treatment facilities try to remove them – but perhaps encouraging some of the microbes to grow could benefit human health.

Lutgarde Raskin of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor says that workers at water treatment facilities across the US try to destroy all of the bacteria in drinking water with infusions of chlorine and other disinfectants. But this is nearly impossible to achieve with the current technology.

The present approach also ignores the fact that the drinking water microbiome contains some bacteria that can be beneficial. For instance, nitrates that can contaminate drinking water could be converted by some bacteria into harmless nitrogen gas. Raskin and her team suggest that encouraging the growth of these bacteria in drinking water could actually improve the quality and safety of the product.

Between April and October 2010, the researchers analysed bacterial DNA in drinking water treated at municipal facilities in Ann Arbor. They wanted to work out exactly which bacteria were present, and what factors influenced the abundance of the various components of the bacterial community.

They found that slightly altering the water's pH during the filtration process, or even changing how filters were cleaned, helped good bacteria outcompete more harmful microorganisms for the limited resources in the water.

"It does no good to try to remove bacteria entirely," says Raskin. "We are suggesting that a few simple changes can be made that will give bacteria that are good for human health an edge over harmful competitors."
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Courtesy New Scientist

Logic blooms with new 11-set Venn diagram

A new rose has blossomed in the garden of mathematics: a flowery Venn diagram for 11 sets of objects.

Venn diagrams use overlapping circles to show all possible relationships between sets. But diagrams for more than two or three sets often require circles to be stretched, squeezed and turned in on themselves to cover the increased number of set relationships.

Such geometrical gymnastics were distasteful to British logician John Venn, who created the diagrams in 1880. What's more, the results of these mathematical acrobatics tend to be too elaborate to be useful.

So, instead, mathematicians hunt for symmetrical diagrams, which are easier to understand and are proven to exist only for Venn diagrams with a prime number of sets. For purity's sake, these diagrams must also be "simple", meaning no more than two curves cross at any point.

Lucky strike

Previously, examples for simple, symmetric Venn diagrams with five and seven sets had been found – but no higher. Now Khalegh Mamakani and Frank Ruskey at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, have hit on the first simple, symmetric 11-set Venn diagram (pictured).

One of the sets is outlined in white, and the colours correspond to the number of overlapping sets. The team called their creation Newroz, Kurdish for "the new day". The name also sounds like "new rose" in English, reflecting the diagram's flowery appearance.

To find the rose-like diagram, the pair had to comb through myriad potential diagrams, represented as lists of numbers corresponding to the way the curves cross. Sifting through all of the possibilities for an 11-set diagram would be an impossible task even for the combined might of Earth's computers, so the researchers narrowed the options by restricting the search to diagrams with a property called crosscut symmetry, meaning that a segment of each set crosses all the other sets exactly once.

Hardcore geometer

The same method has been used to find simple, symmetric seven-set diagrams. Still, the researchers knew there were no guarantees of success. "After searching for them for so long, the big surprise was to find one at all," says Ruskey.

"I love the picture," says Peter Cameron , a mathematician at Queen Mary, University of London. He says the computational techniques used to find Newroz might prove useful in representing other complex geometric objects.

However, the diagram itself is unlikely to have direct practical applications. "We use two and three-set Venn diagrams for working out simple logical puzzles," Cameron says. "Beyond that, I don't think anyone but the most hardcore geometer would use a Venn diagram."
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Courtesy New Scientist