Not quite recently, but after skating through high school and most of college I learned that if you read through your notes before a test you remember more things. I also learned that this is referred to as “studying”.
I am convinced that being “smart” in high school and college stunted my career. I didn’t do any work in high school, and had like 2 classes that I’d consider difficult in college. I never learned the value of hard work.
I hear you. Finally ending up in a class that properly challenged me was like roller skating into wet cement.
Same for me! Everyone told me I was smart, so I never studied in college. Turns out you can still be smart and also fail out of college. Luckily got my act together, but I hold some resentment for my teachers and parents for not teaching m that you can have a knack for things but without follow through it’s worthless
I had to check the username on this comment to ensure that it wasn’t me posting this. I’ve said these words verbatim.
Bonus points I discovered after a bachelor’s degree and most of a master’s:
If you pay attention in class you’ll understand most of the material, and the rest you can ask the professors directly. Truly astounding.
All through high school/college I just always wrote my notes once during class, then almost never referred to them again. For me, just the act of writing out the notes was usually good enough to help me retain the information, for the tests at least. I’ve forgotten most of it, but it was there when I needed it.
You aren’t the only one. I was taking an upgrade class at work and another student saw me taking notes. The instructor told her that a lot of his pupils do something similar.
I’ve seen several articles that claim that taking notes with pen and paper helps people retain information better than taking notes on a keyboard.
I just saw a paper on that. I think the basic idea is that the reason you remember better from handwritten notes versus typing is that each letterform has a unique shape that you have to write down. So your fingers/hands are following along by some sort of choreographed muscle memory when you’re writing stuff down, it’s like a sort of dance that our hands do, tracing out all these letter forms, there’s more uniqueness and complexity to it that somehow stays with us better. Compare that to typing where you’re literally just doing the same action over and over again, you’re just pushing buttons down. You might be able to focus more on what the professor is saying, but you’re more just passively taking it in and your mind isn’t as engaged in your note-taking.
Makes sense.
Writing things down does really help with remembering them. A good chunk of my biology class in high-school was spent copying notes in silence then the teacher reading them out loud. It was pretty effective to have to read, write, and hear the same thing.
I think it’s a focus thing… If you take notes you give yourself a task and force yourself to pay attention rather than zoning out and telling yourself you’re still listening.
I was you once
It’s not fun, but doing it before bed also helps in my experience.
You mean right before a test? That’s cramming.
Cramming is a form of studying, and is still significantly better than my original strategy of “I remember what they said in class”.
I think part of the problem is that schools don’t actually teach how to learn, study strategies, etc.
That annoying character in The Land Before Time is not named Sarah.
Her name is Cera. As in CERATOPS.
That annoying character
How dare you
English spelling is just fantastic. If you hear a new word, there’s pretty much 0 chance that you can look it up in a dictionary on the first try. Just imagine how “epitome” sounds to someone who isn’t already familiar with it. You’re going to have to go though every vowel before you actually find it.
Also, if you’ve never heard a special word being pronounced, but you’ve read it many times, you are pretty much guaranteed to make a fool of yourself when you finally get to use that word in a social situation. No wonder why spelling bees are a thing in English speaking countries.
I read somewhere that you should never look down on anyone for mispronouncing a word because it means they learned it by reading.
As a childhood bookworm, that lesson stuck with me.
Thank you for this.
I used to get picked on a lot by my family because I was made of books (by hs I was going through 1000 pages a day on average), and often mispronounced words I’d never heard used…
In college I took a linguistics course and learned a similar lesson about speaking and both pronunciation and word choice, and how it’s not only highly regional and always evolving, but also influenced very heavily by native tongue and socioeconomic status (how many years of education, for example, or languages spoken at home), so judging people for being imperfect speakers or writers is pointless. They are doing this wildly difficult thing, communicating, and as long as what they are conveying is understood, it was a successful exchange! Yay!
How on earth were you reading 1000 pages a day of anything? Even if you read at the extremely fast rate of 45 seconds per page of a book, that’s still 12.5 hours a day of actively reading to get to 1000 pages.
Exactly that; I spent essentially all of my time reading. In class, between classes, after school. I had no friends because I’d changed schools and was close enough to graduation to not be worth making new friends I wouldn’t keep contact with. So I read a lot. The librarians even gave me another card so I could inter-library-loan more stuff.
Wow. And I thought I was an avid reader
I thought it was “for all intensive purposes” until I finally came across it while reading, and I was reading a book a week for well over a decade at that point. That’s just the way it’s pronounced down here.
One step closer to the origin: “to all intents and purposes”. If I use that, people are definitely going to look at me weird.
But when you shared that lesson out loud for the first time, did you pronounce it correctly?
Chill dude boke warm?
This feels like a gross exaggeration of the problems with English. there’s a lot of patterns to English, despite a lot of weirdness and a lot of exceptions. But if you hear a new word, it will normally be easy to find in the dictionary on the first try. All that being said, yeah English is probably a mess compared to most languages, which is why it has spelling bees
Yeah, you’re right. That was a bit too harsh. Those patterns exist, and they make it easier to navigate this maze. Once you know the common ones, you don’t actually have to try every letter every time.
spelling bees are a thing in English speaking countries
I think they’re just an American thing
And there’s a bar near me that’s starting Adult Spelling Bee night, as opposed to trivia night. I think we’re about to hit peak Idiocracy.
Spelling bees can be fun, and trivia can be boring. It’s all a matter of how they run it.
They do exist around the world but I think they’re something of a novelty. Clicking through to the wiki article for “spelling bee” in general the history is all very American.
apparently, you’re right, it’s an American thing we exported, like rock and Roll and nulcear weapons.
Respite was the epitome of your second paragraph, for me. (That sentence works on two levels in this context). Had always thought it was pronounced like re-spite until I said that out loud and was mocked for it.
Respite is one of those words. You don’t get to use or hear it very often. Come to think of it, I would probably pronounce it the logical way, just like you did. Ok, now I’m going to have to look it up.
Turns out, difference pages give a slightly different pronunciation: /rĕs′pĭt/, ri-ˈspīt, /ˈres.paɪt/, /ˈres.pət/. So, the first vowel is mostly /e/ and the last one seems to be /ı/ if some kind.
I just looked this up on Forvo because I thought it was pronounced ress-pite (I don’t know IPA sorry), about half of the recordings agree, while the other half says ress-pit…
English spelling is weird but thats not really a hard word to spell compared to many others. Epitome is either an e or an i, and I would argue a native speaker would lean heavily towards e as a first guess. There is no way that it starts with a, o, or u for example. That’s hardly “every vowel”. It’s at most 2 vowels and most people would have better than even odds if they heard epitome pronounced correctly.
English spelling is mostly consistent other than words from other languages, especially Welsh and Gaelic. There’s the small hiccup with the aristocrats that latinized some words too.
The first time I heard it, was in a BBC documentary about old cars. The pronunciation was nowhere near /ɪˈpɪt.ə.mi/. I think it started with something like /ə/ instead, and that sound corresponds with way too many letters and I haven’t figured out how to make any sense of that.
Fortunately, modern tools will help you find the word you’re looking for, so knowing the correct spelling isn’t that critical any more. However, I was using a paper dictionary at the time, which explains why it took so long.
Apparently I learned that as I read that just now.
That you aren’t supposed to rinse immediately after brushing your teeth. It’s better to wait 15 minutes to let the fluoride strengthen your enamel.
Been brushing the wrong way for 30 years, apparently.
Ain’t nobody got time for that!
Just spit it all out three or four times, wipe your mouth off and go about your day. You won’t even notice.
Actually rinsing isn’t needed at all
You’re probably right, I just hate that toothpaste aftertaste and feeling in my mouth otherwise
Find a different flavour of toothpaste!
Use the tooth brush and running water to brush your tongue clean, and spit a few times. That way you get a clean tasting/feeling mouth while not rinsing the suds from your teeth.
Yes, this is correct. I do not rinse. Nor do I get my brush wet before brushing. The only water I use is to rinse my brush after brushing.
Dry brushing sounds miserable… No thank you!
Silly to not even try, my friend…blunderworld…
You mouth is usually pretty wet so it does not stay dry for long.
No dentist has ever said this to me.
A dentist said it to me years ago.
But I suspect that using a Sonicare makes a bigger difference for tooth health than not rinsing.
Me neither. I feel betrayed.
“Spit don’t rinse” folks.
The fuck?
Yeah. I had to give a “how to” class and I picked brushing your teeth as a simple topic. I got to the end after brushing your teeth. I said rinse your mouth out and your done. The instructor said “the presentation was okay, but you aren’t supposed to rinse your teeth out right away.”
I had no idea as amid to late 20 something at the time. What else do you do wrong?
And if you throw up, don’t brush your teeth as you’re then just scrubbing stomach acid into them. Rinse and gargle with water then brush an hour later
So I tried this for a few months last year. Although I didn’t rinse 15 mins afterwards or anything - I just spit as much of the toothpaste out as I could.
Couldn’t really tell a difference other than it was strange feeling to have all the toothpaste remnants in your mouth. Maybe my teeth were slightly whiter? I eventually went back to my old ways of rinsing. Maybe I’ll try it again though.
Meh I doubt it makes much difference. Especially if you live somewhere that has fluoride in the water. Most of the US, don’t know about Europe.
This is also true if you use something like sensodine for sensitivity. If you let it sit on your teeth a bit it works better
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The guy who runs Reddit is an utter douchebag.
I spent 30+ years thinking that a pony was a baby horse rather than a smaller type of horse. You know how cats have kittens and dogs have puppies? Well I thought horses had ponies.
Even all the times that Lisa Simpson wanted a pony, I just thought it was similar to how a kid might want a puppy.
To be fair:
The word pony derives from the old French poulenet, meaning foal, a young, immature horse.
Quoth wikipedia.
Well this is a TIL moment. You saved me at ~28 years.
Common sense is not common.
Common sense is a fundamentally broken concept.
It’s not that “few people have common sense” (the fact that this phrase gets tossed around should be clue #1 for you), but that there cannot be such a thing as sense that is common. Every region, every community, every social circle, and every individual have vastly different personal experiences and ways of doing things in life. Some people may have similar experiences to eachother, but thats no guarantee.
Typically you see the word “common sense” only used as an insult and a way to tear someone else down. You rarely if ever see it used as a complement or an objective fact. “That person has a lot of common sense” sounds wrong the first time you hear it right?
You’ve given me unwanted flashbacks to my previous relationship. I felt so stupid around her for this reason.
Maybe we should just lower the bar of what’s considered common sense. Water is wet and rocks sink in water, that should be common knowledge.
However, it isn’t common knowledge that you have to be careful with medication. I would like it to be, but people still make dangerous mistakes like taking a double dose after missing one.
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So true…😆
I knew about this on some level before, but the recent posts have given me a better understanding on how in some countries people need expensive third party software to pay their taxes.
Freetaxusa.com Isn’t expensive. It’s dumb it still costs money for state but the company that lobbies the government to make our tax code complicated costs a lot more.
You can also do your taxes manually if you know you have a simple return. Or use the expensive software and check it against your manual.
It all sucks though. It should be dead simple as the government already knows 99% of everyone’s tax info.
Yeah, fortunately I live in America where filing taxes is free and takes like five minutes out of the year
But why do they make everyone file a tax return? In the UK it’s only necessary if you’re self-employed or very wealthy. Is it because they like auditing poor people so they have an excuse not to audit the rich?
Politicians decided to use the tax system as an incentive system. The IRS knows roughly how much money you made, there’s a handful of ways you could make money they wouldn’t know about like gambling winnings below $600.
What the IRS doesn’t know is if you installed new windows, had a child, donated to charity, paid state or local taxes, paid for daycare, went through adoption, paid tuition expenses, and more. All of those things can be used to reduce your tax burden, so you have to file taxes to tell the IRS how much you spent on these things.
There’s also the standard deduction, which negates most of those deductions and works for about 80% of the country.
DK,DC. The effort needed to file a tax return is negligible. It’s literally as easy as getting a piece of paper in the mail, going to a website, and copying like four numbers and then getting a few hundred dollars in the mail. The only scenarios where this takes more than 5 minutes is if you’re either self-employed or have a lot of wealth in assets you want to claim.
Yeah, fuck everyone else who has multiple jobs, is partially or fully self employed, has taxable assets and isn’t allowed to use the free software.
Anyone can file directly to the IRS, point blank, it just might take more than five minutes. I filed for four years when I was self-employed just fine. I filed for multiple jobs this year for free.
1040EZ, $0, $0, $0, $0.
Taxes done
A pancake is a cake you make in a pan.
It broke my mind when I learned that one
…and when you take a detour, you are getting off your original tour. (Tour de France, tour of the countryside, etc)
Hence, why you de-tour.
Did everyone work this out at first glance? The etymology of ‘detour’ took me way too long.
Along these lines, I recently learned:
Painstakingly is pains + takingly (as in “took great pains”), not pain + stakingly.
Helicopter is helico + pter (“spiral wing”), not heli + copter.
In linguistics, this phenomenon is called rebracketing.
rebracketing.
TIL
I never knew those two either.
Love the helico-pter one. Of course!
Well, I’m there with you buddy. This is the first I see it.
Wait until you hear about butterflies and dragonflies.
Butterflies, flies that you make with butter.
Just like the way a snowman is a man made of snow.
So a woman is made of wo(e)?
Woah, man!
Have you heard about asswipes
please don’t tell me I been using them wrong
wtfffff
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prima donna != pre-Madonna
Wanna see something cool?
≠
You aren’t ready.
In my day we just had <> and it was good enough for us.
Holy shit. I found this out less than 6 months ago. I always heard “pre-Madonna” thinking it had something to do with Madonna. I thought I was the only one. For context it took me like 30 years of hearing it before I saw it in writing.
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People know less than they think they do, which is why everyone calling everyone else morons is probably correct.
‘Moron’ was (and technically may still be) a clinical term meaning someone of intelligence so low they’re unable to function without supervision. Every time they invent a new non-emotionally-loaded term for low intelligence, we ruin it by using it as an insult.
It’s a beautiful thing.
That when cooking anything with leftover grease you should always dispose of the excess grease in an empty container and trash it instead of putting it down a drain.
Also that it’s best for your pipes to put your used toilet paper in a trash can instead of flushing it.
always dispose of the excess grease in an empty container and trash it instead of putting it down a drain.
This will likely vary greatly by country, but here in the UK some supermarkets have a section in their recycling centre where used grease and cooking oil can be deposited to be recycled into fuel of some sort.
Yeah, I got that as well. It’s called ‘pour it into the campfire and admire the fireball’.
In my city, in the US, they say to pour it in an old jar and then trash it.
That bit about the toilet paper isn’t true unless you have roots growing through your sewer line. A bit of copper sulfate down the drain will take care of that, though.
*Unless your landlord raises your rent 20%
That’s fair.
There’s nothing wrong with putting toilet paper down your pipes… Please do, having used toilet paper in a bin is nasty and possibly harmful to garbage company employees.
“Flushable wipes” you probably just shouldn’t use, but if you do use them those are not truly flushable and those unfortunately you do need to put in a bin. They can cause problems for your plumbing, particularly in an older house.
Most toilet papers are fine, although some systems struggle with Costco’s stuff. Toilet paper is designed to break apart in water. That said, you shouldn’t flush any other products. Paper towels don’t break down the same way, and wipes will almost certainly cause damage, even if they are marketed as flushable!!
That not all drinks get you drunk the same way.
No? I’m interested to hear the details of this.
I always thought drunkenness was drunkenness as opposed to it being a spectrum. I had my first drink when I was 21 and hated the experience of being drunk, so I didn’t seek it out after that, but recently I had a situation where the outcome of getting drunk crept on me, except it felt only vaguely similar to what I remember. I actually spent a while debating with myself over if I was drunk or not until I had someone explain.
It’s mostly just a function of alcohol by volume. It takes a certain amount of alcohol to get you drunk, but you can drink it a lot faster as 80 proof (40%) whiskey than you can 5% beer.
Water doesn’t get you drunk at all!
Maybe this more of a misheard lyrics thing, but for a long time I thought “noxious gas” had to do with nitrogen oxides (NOx), and then spread to other metaphorical applications like “noxious weeds” and so on.
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