<p>No. Psychology is one of the most fascinating subject you can acquaint yourself with. Think about it. Knowing how people work! On so many different levels. I bet if you taught psychology in the middle ages, it would pretty much be on the par of black magic (but then you’d be burnt).</p>
<p>I say this kind of stuff a lot but most of my peers do not understand. You have to be enlightened by your education. It’s the only thing that you can arm yourself with against all that flood of irrelevant stuff you get from the media and society each day.</p>
<p>Specifically? Wow. If you are trying to memorize vocabularies to learn this stuff, then it’s perhaps not for you. Drop it at semester then, because memorizing psychology stuff really isn’t that interesting since most theorizes in psychology can be explained in layman terms but there are always random jargon attached to a concept (structuralism, reinforcement etc.) Of course there are emotion theories later, and those stuff has to be memorized because they are very confusing.</p>
<p>Suggestions:
Read. I suggest you read some of the tomes that you are learning about. Freud is a funny guy? Perhaps read one of his works. I think there’s a “Portable Freud” collection of his good stuff excerpted from his works. Other than that, read something like Ego and the Id. Challenging? Definitely. </p>
<p>But the reward is infinite. When you have that stuff under your belt, you can tackle things like history, art, philosophy, because Freud really dug up the unconscious and rubbed in people’s face. Check out some artwork of the surrealist, relate that to the psychoanalytical concepts. Dali and Ernst would be a good place to start. You can learn stuff like Jung’s universal archetype, or just Freudian buzzwords like repressed memories and such.</p>
<p>Perhaps you haven’t gotten into the memory chapter yet. But take a peak of that in your textbook. Check out how your memory works and learn how to reinforce your learning with multiple “modalities and submodalities,” meaning make connection with your senses or with other knowledge. For example, if you have gotten into conditioning, I just relate it to a famous experiment. Pavlov’s dog is a good ringer (ding!).</p>
<p>But you know what’s the most fun? Try some of the freaky stuff you learn! Operant condition someone. Try to reinforce the behavior you want! Try it with your family or friends (Billy Mays here, introducing a new technique). When you learn about circadian rhythms, monitor your own! Interpret your own dreams (of course the Freudian “trains into tunnel” method is preferred.)</p>
<p>If you get into the chapter on altered consciousness. Try dive into hypnosis! Yes that stuff is real, people with PhDs do it for a living. I suggest reading about “Neurolinguistic programming.” That’s basically a hypnotic communication method that allows you to be more persuasive, more sensible about your interactions, and pick up more girls (boys?) Oh if you ever learn about body language, or emotions, try to spot them on others. Learn that trick where you tell if someone is actually smiling or not (real smile stretches the muscle on the side of your eyes whereas fake smiles do not).</p>
<p>See? Interesting stuff right? You don’t need to make a ton of notecards to remember stuff. If you are ever interested by something, wikipedia it. Bring it to class and share it. Try to be slightly disturbing, I think that’s a daring thing to do.</p>
<p>Lastly, I recommend another book. It’s one of those pop science books by Malcom Gladwell called the “Tipping Point.” Strangely, it can be the perfect AP test study guide because he uses almost terms from all the chapters you learn to explain phenomenon in life of the masses. It’s not a book about psychology, it’s about the world. Read that and you will be see terms you learned being made connection to things that you wouldn’t expect. I read this summer from a bookshelf and I was quite disappointed I didn’t read it prior to taking the AP test.</p>
<p>Good luck on your endeavors.</p>