Viraj's Weblog

We had our first exam in Chemistry and I got a 100%. Hell I never did this good when I went to school in the past heh. Honestly I seem to take school more seriously now than I did back then. Hopefully I can keep up the steam.

I had originally planned on putting class notes up on my wiki, but I realized that after I take notes I rarely ever look at them again heh. I've found the best way to remember or understand something is doing alot of problems at the back of the chapters over and over again.

Well this will work for the problem-solving classes at least, but not much for memorization. For that I try to look for patterns and such. Like for the chem exam we have this cation/anion table that we are supposed to memorize, and the teacher says "there's no way to figure them out." But actually all you need to do is memorize a few key items from the table, not the whole thing, and you can calculate the rest (ion charge, number of each atom) from the periodic table which is given to you during a test. Also doing alot of problems you learn to recognize them alot faster, and are able to know which ones don't look right.

It's all about familiarity and practice. I know some people who have photographic memories. Not me, I have to do ALOT of practice to remember something.