How to Help Yourself Learn

Learning a new subject is often challenging. Here are some tips that can help you in the learning process.

• Keep up with classes. The topics that will be covered in this course build one on the other and they can easily feel overwhelming if you do not dedicate enough time to studying them as you encounter them. Therefore, it is paramount (and expected of you) that you try to keep up with the course material and the suggested exercises week by week. Students that work at a consistent pace throughout the term and do self-directed exploration of topics tend to achieve better results in university-level mathematics courses. Coming to classes as well as being attentive and asking for explanations during lectures are great ways to make sure you dedicate proficuous time to your learning.
• Do the suggested exercises. In order for you to accumulate enough expertise in the various topics and consolidate your understanding, it is fundamental that you do enough exercise to test your knowledge. Researches show it is not only important that you focus on the quality of your practice (that is, on solving focused and meaningful exercises), but also on the quantity (do many exercises). This is the reason why you should do as many (suggested) exercises as needed to make sure you are comfortable with the material - and, after that, do a bit more of them. Note that the point is not for you to learn how to solve exercises by heart, but to gain sufficient experience in retrieving these solutions.
• Learn from your mistakes. Learning does not come without misconceptions and mistakes. Not only these are completely fine, but overcoming them is often how we acquire some of our strongest and deepest knowledge. This is the reason why on the "Exercises & Other Resources" page you will find a file with a list of common mistakes which you should be mindful of, so that you can avoid making them yourself. That list will be updated as we encounter new topics in class and might contain recurrent mistakes appearing in the quizzes. Learning to understand why a mistake is such is also the reason why you should try to solve an exercise by yourself before asking for help (see below), so that the answers and the feedback you receive by those helping you can be targeted to solve specific problems you encountered.