Tips From the Old School

To My Students at a Nearby Community College

This course is pretty old school, and that is something I know a little about since I am near the end of a teaching career that began in 1978. I do not pretend to know much or anything about what is to come, or what your lives will be like, so I will restrict myself to hazarding some advice for successful book learning, which is the bulk of what we are doing here.

1) Approach your learning as if you will live forever. That does not mean you should assume the luxury of time, and lollygag your way to knowledge. It means, rather, that you should assume that you must go about learning everything in the world, as you will at some point need it all.

2) Even though we have yet to gain even a rudimentary understanding of the origin or nature of consciousness, we know that some methods for installing items there, i.e. learning, work because we have been deploying them for millennia. Here are a few:

• Immediately double the time that you devote to reading text (preferably on paper).
• Free up the time for this by reducing your screen time by the necessary amount.
• Make a commitment to restrict your social media time to thirty minutes per day starting today (ten minutes would be even better).
• Understand that logically…