Studying and Random Acts of Housework

My qualifying exam is rapidly approaching (yikes!) and I have started studying in earnest. Sitting down and reading through the two textbooks those who have gone before are the most valuable. They also are two textbooks that when I was using them for class I hated. They are big. They are heavy. They are densely written, lightly edited and in one case had some major layout issues. Their problems sets are horrible.

But coming back to reading them, after a year for one and 4 years for the other, I have a new appreciation of them both. They are informative, if still having all their other problems, and are readable, just not in a 'I need to know this formula!' way. Most importantly, what they are saying sounds familiar (not a good thing in a book necessarily, but it makes me slightly less terrified that I don't actually know anything).

I have a confession. I don't really know how to study. I'm one of those awful people who coasted through most of school, never really studied, and still did well. Over the years I have tried to learn, but its hard to learn a technique when the final step of the technique is "do you understand this? move on" and you already are pretty confident in your understanding. I'm not awfully good at memorizing equations, but we were always allowed an equation sheet, so no worries there. Until now.

So now I am trying to learn to study while studying for the most important exam of my life. This is what comes of not needing to all these years. If I ever have children, I will do my best to teach them to study, even if it means teaching them something difficult just so they actually have to study. That is, if I ever learn how to do it myself.

A side effect of my getting down to studying is random acts of housework. Housework that either gets put off, or I do sporadically, or don't do every single day suddenly starts getting done. I swept my front porch. I put up a clock. I swept up all the little things that keep coming off our carpet remnant. I made the dining room look pretty.

via Wikimedia Commons

I've done this since college, and luckily for me my roommate did the same thing. Our dorm / apartment was never cleaner than when one or both of us had a test or a paper. Its productive procrastination at its best! And once it was all done, which didn't take long in a small dorm room, we had nothing left to productively procrastinate with, and a nice clean room to work in. 

So I guess the conclusion to this post is, even if I don't learn to study enough to pass my qualifier, my house will be very tidy. Small comforts?