You should learn:
You should also study the following appendix:
Some people with adequate learning skills do poorly in college for other reasons. The most common example is the person who has to carry another full-time job. Most students can handle a part-time job, especially one that is somehow related to school, but heavy outside commitments inevitably interfere with studies. I have no solution for financial problems, but there are some helpful things to say about the more personal problems that often trouble students.
The range of personal problems is surprisingly large. Indeed, almost every aspect of a person's existence is a potential source of problems. You may feel that this or that part of your body is too big or too little, or you may think that you engage in one or another type of behavior too seldom or too often. Many things that may seem trivial to you may trouble someone else. For this reason, I can only illustrate some of the more common student problems and can only give general approaches toward how to deal with them.
Whatever the problem, a person naturally worries about it. We worry when we know that worrying won't solve the problem, and the more personal the problem, the more likely we are to keep it to ourselves. Which is more, otherwise intelligent people tend to be very stupid in the context of their problem. For example, people who think that they "worry too much" may believe that worrying can cause insanity. So they not only worry about their problems, they also worry about worrying so much.
Now worrying will not drive you crazy, but it does preoccupy your mind with non-academic thoughts. Everybody has a one-track mind, so you can't concentrate on your studies and worry about something else at the same time. Yet many students automatically start to worry any time they try to study. Worrying can become a mental habit that obstructs study habits.
To understand why this is true, you need to know about the basic principle of learning, namely association by contiguity:
An activity becomes associated with any
situation(s) in which it repeatedly occurs.
To be "associated" means that the occurrence of one tends to call forth the other. If you brush your teeth when you get up in the morning, you will develop the habit; if you follow some particular route to school each day, that route will become habitual; if you regularly buckle your seat belt when you get into a car, the act of buckling your seat belt will be associated with getting into a car. Habits tend to occur automatically, without any conscious thought. Indeed, you are likely to become aware of your habits only if they are blocked for some reason. In sum, practice is all that is needed to form strong habits.
I used the word "activity" in stating the Principle of Habit Formation, and the examples I have given so far all involve physical acts. Actions that are openly observable to other people are called overt. But the principle also applies to covert activities that are private. Hence, a special case of the principle, which we call a theorem, is this:
States of mind become associated with
situations in which they occur frequently.
"States of mind" include being sleepy or awake, being attentive or distracted, and the wide range of moods that we all experience from time to time. . .fearful, excited, blue, lonely, happy, sad, sexy, etc. These are all normal states of mind that occur in various situations. What the theorem adds to common knowledge is that mental states are learnable: You can learn to feel sleepy not only at your usual bed-time, but also whenever you start to read a textbook. You can learn to feel anxious when taking exams, alert when attending lectures, relaxed when listening to music. Habits include how you feel as well as what you do.