<p>I'm just curious to know how many other people are out there like me who learn most of the class-material outside of class through reading the textbook, googling, or asking a friend to explain the concepts to me.</p>
<p>Better yet, how many of you learn most of what the class teaches when you're in class. And by that I mean how many of you actually go into class cold without any prior knowledge of the material covered (e.g. no reading the textbook on the lecture beforehand) and learn most of the subject while in class. What I'm not asking though is how many of you master the course with just going to lectures because I know that would be very difficult for most people. I'm just asking how many of you have enough knowledge from lectures/notes to study from to master the class?</p>
<p>I haven’t looked at the textbook for chem, phys, math. For japanese I learned all the textbook material by myself then treated the classes as review & speaking practice. For biol I tried to do the readings each weekend before and take notes, but sometimes I fell behind… Doing the readings allowed me to understand everything that went on in lecture, but doing the readings after helped me to link the textbook with the lecture material so there are benefits to both.</p>
<p>I learn about 90% of the class material on my own, but that includes using the professor’s PowerPoints if he/she has them. Generally, my professors put their slides on BlackBoard for us to download, so when it comes to actually learning the material, I just read the textbook, do the homework, and use the slides to sum everything up (because they’re usually more a summary than anything else).</p>
<p>As for actually learning in class, well, that doesn’t usually happen. I can’t absorb new information well in a classroom setting, especially if the teacher is mostly talking about the information. Depending on the class, I may either take no notes or several pages of notes per session, which I then review as part of studying for assessments and what not. However, I haven’t actually used written notes for much recently; I don’t think I really took any the entire fall semester (save for solving problems during Finance)…and I didn’t need to. -shrug-</p>
<p>I taught myself 99.9% of math this semester and last semester. My teacher was AWFUL and made everything 1000 times more difficult than it had to be. He once spent 45 minutes teaching us a concept that no one understood. The week before the test I checked out Khan Academy and discovered it took ~2 minutes to do the same thing and ended up teaching it to the rest of the class. </p>