Slow down and read the textbook!

Welcome. This blog is dedicated to students taking AP/Honors Biology at ICS (LWSD), in the Fall term of 2011. I am a tutor to several students in this class. As I start writing, we are already some ways into the course: just past the second exam. The material is getting more challenging, so I decided to start posting free advice that just might help. The content of these pages is not endorsed by the school or the teacher. Please feel free to post comments.

Dear Students,

As we begin our intensive study of metabolic pathways, I want to give you some tips on how to approach the material, and how to get into it – or rather how to get it into you, in a useful form.

Once again your teacher has provided an outline of key terms and concepts, each followed by a small space for you to write down what the textbook says about it. The outline for this segment of the course is a formidable document: eight pages long, and consisting of close to one hundred terms. Don’t be scared. The good news is that all of these terms are functionally related to many others, like characters and events in a story. If you are reading a story (say, a serialized saga about dungeons and dragons or something), it’s fairly easy to learn a hundred interrelated terms!

There are two big stories here: Chapter 9 tells the story of how we (all eukaryotes) get energy out of food; Chapter 10 tells about how plants (or more accurately, chloroplasts) get energy out of sunlight, and how plant cells make sugar out of carbon dioxide. Forget about Chapter 10 for now. Focus on the first story: how we get energy from food.

The introduction to Chapter 9 (pages 155 – 159) tells the story in broad outline; explains why energy comes out when oxygen combines with gasoline or glucose; and introduces some key biochemical players in the drama of cellular respiration. Read it like a story; make sure that every part of it makes total sense to you. Don’t take notes, or look at the teacher’s outline, until you are done reading this intro. Enjoy. If you find yourself completely stumped by something, call a classmate to talk about it. If you are both stumped, keep going, and try to make sense of the mystery by analyzing the details.

Having the teacher’s outline in hand, you may be tempted to use it as a study guide: that is, to study by looking at each term in the outline and searching the textbook for the ‘answer.’ Don’t do this! You are not a search engine, and the textbook is not the Internet. Like all books, it is meant to be read and understood as written: each chapter is a narrative made for you to easily travel through, gathering understanding along the way.

My recommendation for taking notes as you read: use blank paper, unlined if possible. Papers should be held together in some kind of notebook. Organize ideas in the paper-space in a way that makes sense to you. Ideas can be circled or colored in for emphasis; can be connected by lines and/or color codes to show relationships; can be arrayed with other ideas, or can sit alone in wide open spaces if you know that there’s much yet unwritten about them.

Afterwards, you can go back to the teacher’s outline to make sure that you have covered everything that’s going to be on the test.

More later, as I get into my study of the metabolic pathways. (I’ve forgotten all the details, so I have to learn it again.)

Cheers,

Morgan G.