Now I’m typically pretty good about not waiting until the last minute to study for an exam, but it turns out that I still had a lot of stuff I needed to do last week and so I had to sacrifice a bunch of other things (like posting to this blog) in order to get them done. My hand still seems cramped from the hundreds of handwritten vocabulary flashcards I made. It seemed like thousands by the time I was finally done.

Although I didn’t procrastinate, I still wasn’t as wise as an elephant would have been in the same situation, or at least as wise as the person who managed to eat an entire elephant. That’s assuming the elephant didn’t eat itself like that unusual episode of The Simpsons some years ago where Homer’s head turned into a doughnut and he began picking at it because it was “soooo tasty.”

In Homer Simpson voice: Mmmmm doughnut….

So I have a better study strategy for this next exam. I went through and counted all of the pages in the upcoming chapter that I want to complete by the end of this week, and divided them up more or less equally. I also divided all of the vocabulary. For each of the next five days I will read those pages of the text and create the appropriate amount of vocabulary cards. By dividing the chapter and vocabulary into small portions, I won’t be attempting to cram in the entire chapter over one weekend and won’t get hand cramps by writing too many vocabulary cards at once. Since I’ll have the chapter and the cards done by this weekend, I’ll be able to use the weekend for going over the homework problems and will have had the week to digest all of the information in smaller pieces.

Another advantage is that by studying in smaller pieces, I am even less likely to procrastinate doing it because I only need to do a little bit at a time and then I’m done for the day. It’s practically painless.

Now no more talk! Do!

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