Most of us are told to study. But is anyone shown how?
A lot of us spend twelve years in school without a single lesson on how learning works. So the hours go in, some of it stays, a lot of it does not, and nobody can tell you which part until the exam does.
A girl grew up hating maths and science. She flunked her way through them at school. At 26, she started again, from remedial trigonometry.
That girl is Barbara Oakley, who is now a professor of engineering and has spent years writing about how people learn. Her work is one of the sources behind this course.
Nothing here promises you her story. What this course does offer is the thing she had to find out for herself, late and the hard way: how learning actually works, and what to do about it tonight.
Meet Kabir and Riya. Same class, same chapters, same mother asking whether they have eaten. Between them, they make most of the mistakes most of us have made, so you do not have to make all of them yourself.
Kabir and Riya.
The course is one argument, in order. It starts where most of us start: tired, and unsure why the hours are not paying. It ends with a way of studying you can use for any exam, and for anything you learn after it. Each page is short, and each one ends with something you can do tonight.
Long hours, a heavy head, and marks that do not match. Nothing is wrong with you.
Nobody runs the full distance on day one. A little, every day, for a long time.
Deciding gets you to the start line. Habit brings you back on the mornings you do not feel like running.
You are not lazy. Putting it off is usually a way to escape a bad feeling for a while, and the dread is often worse while you wait than once you begin.
Not yet. People who type fast with two fingers hit a ceiling. Learning the right fingers is slower at first, and then it keeps getting faster. Method first, then speed.
Your mind. A few ideas about how it holds things change how you use it.
Not quite. It is a network, and it strengthens the paths you actually use.
A mind still busy with the day has less room for the page. A few quiet minutes clear the desk.
It certainly feels like it. Read the article →
An evening with a shape, block by block. Read the article →
Once a week, yes. Every day, no: the full paper goes next to the daily blocks, not instead of them.
Every wrong answer is one of three things, and each has a different fix.
On anything with answers you can check in a minute: past papers, reasoning questions, a friend’s quiz.
The girl from the top of this page, Barbara Oakley, went on to make a course about exactly this with the neuroscientist Terrence Sejnowski: Learning How to Learn, on Coursera. Over 4 million people have signed up. It is taught in English, with Hindi subtitles.
Her books, if you would rather read:
Or hear her talk it through with Shane Parrish on The Knowledge Project, the Farnam Street podcast (in English).
We are not connected to Barbara Oakley, Coursera or Farnam Street. We are fans of her work, and of the many other researchers these pages draw on.