So, I've been through the 26th grade. More time in school after high school than before. And I didn't finish until I was 41. In the middle (if you're counting) there were 7 years of training in a different career, a different set of oral boards (passed, btw), and a whopping total of 3 years in the work force where I was really studying for admission into grades 23-26 (aka residency).<p>If expertise is learning all the ways to fail, I must surely be an expert in learning how to learn. I even did a survey of my medical school classmates on the subject and found some trends. I then proceeded to ignore many of those trends myself, and reaped the consequences. Finally, I implemented what I was supposed to from the beginning, and ... you know what? It fucking works.<p>Do not take a laptop to class. Take handwritten notes. Take your notes in a bound volume with a few pages at the front for a table of contents (1). Fill in the table of contents later. That will force you to re-engage with your notes and figure out what it was you meant to write, and boil it down to something very pithy in the ToC.<p>I told my kids what to do. I told them I would buy all the notebooks they wanted. I would keep them. They should never throw them away. They are now crushing it. My daughter has a 3.9 in a top school. My son hasn't finished high school and he ran out of math classes in the local community college (2).<p>I still journal. It's not really notes now, but I sit down at least a few times a week and write down the things that happened each day. Each and every day is documented. For a number of reasons. First, for my own letting go. Second, for remembering. Third, as memoranda for the record. It's quite hard to plagiarize page 42 of 256 pages when all the other pages are filled in too. (3)<p>(1) I strongly favor Leuchtturm1917 A5. Better papers, slightly wider, better ToC, better bookmark ribbons. I prefer dots or grid.<p>(2) the Silicon Valley community colleges have pretty solid math. There's a story that Hewlett Packard actually stocked de Anza's math department with HP engineers at one point because they projected they wouldn't be able to fill their hiring requirements without growing their own. Talk about a build-vs-buy decision!<p>(3) For journaling, I've switched to larger A4+ because I'm just writing longhand and, especially as a lefty, I find the binding (any binding) to be mildly frustrating.