”I danced from the moment I learned to stand on my feet. I have danced all my life. Man, all humanity, the whole world, must dance. This was, and will always be.— Isadora Duncan
↳Aesthetic- Rio Anderson
More you might like
How to Study Like a Harvard Student
Taken from Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld, daughter of the Tiger Mother
Preliminary Steps
1. Choose classes that interest you. That way studying doesn’t feel like slave labor. If you don’t want to learn, then I can’t help you.
2. Make some friends. See steps 12, 13, 23, 24.
General Principles
3. Study less, but study better.
4. Avoid Autopilot Brain at all costs.
5. Vague is bad. Vague is a waste of your time.
6. Write it down.
7. Suck it up, buckle down, get it done.
Plan of Attack Phase I: Class
8. Show up. Everything will make a lot more sense that way, and you will save yourself a lot of time in the long run.
9. Take notes by hand. I don’t know the science behind it, but doing anything by hand is a way of carving it into your memory. Also, if you get bored you will doodle, which is still a thousand times better than ending up on stumbleupon or something.
Phase II: Study Time
10. Get out of the library. The sheer fact of being in a library doesn’t fill you with knowledge. Eight hours of Facebooking in the library is still eight hours of Facebooking. Also, people who bring food and blankets to the library and just stay there during finals week start to smell weird. Go home and bathe. You can quiz yourself while you wash your hair.
11. Do a little every day, but don’t let it be your whole day. “This afternoon, I will read a chapter of something and do half a problem set. Then, I will watch an episode of South Park and go to the gym” ALWAYS BEATS “Starting right now, I am going to read as much as I possibly can…oh wow, now it’s midnight, I’m on page five, and my room reeks of ramen and dysfunction.”
12. Give yourself incentive. There’s nothing worse than a gaping abyss of study time. If you know you’re going out in six hours, you’re more likely to get something done.
13. Allow friends to confiscate your phone when they catch you playing Angry Birds. Oh and if you think you need a break, you probably don’t.
Phase III: Assignments
14. Stop highlighting. Underlining is supposed to keep you focused, but it’s actually a one-way ticket to Autopilot Brain. You zone out, look down, and suddenly you have five pages of neon green that you don’t remember reading. Write notes in the margins instead.
15. Do all your own work. You get nothing out of copying a problem set. It’s also shady.
16. Read as much as you can. No way around it. Stop trying to cheat with Sparknotes.
17. Be a smart reader, not a robot (lol). Ask yourself: What is the author trying to prove? What is the logical progression of the argument? You can usually answer these questions by reading the introduction and conclusion of every chapter. Then, pick any two examples/anecdotes and commit them to memory (write them down). They will help you reconstruct the author’s argument later on.
18. Don’t read everything, but understand everything that you read. Better to have a deep understanding of a limited amount of material, than to have a vague understanding of an entire course. Once again: Vague is bad. Vague is a waste of your time.
19. Bullet points. For essays, summarizing, everything.
Phase IV: Reading Period (Review Week)
20. Once again: do not move into the library. Eat, sleep, and bathe.
21. If you don’t understand it, it will definitely be on the exam. Solution: textbooks; the internet.
22. Do all the practice problems. This one is totally tiger mom.
23. People are often contemptuous of rote learning. Newsflash: even at great intellectual bastions like Harvard, you will be required to memorize formulas, names and dates. To memorize effectively: stop reading your list over and over again. It doesn’t work. Say it out loud, write it down. Remember how you made friends? Have them quiz you, then return the favor.
24. Again with the friends: ask them to listen while you explain a difficult concept to them. This forces you to articulate your understanding. Remember, vague is bad.
25. Go for the big picture. Try to figure out where a specific concept fits into the course as a whole. This will help you tap into Big Themes – every class has Big Themes – which will streamline what you need to know. You can learn a million facts, but until you understand how they fit together, you’re missing the point.
Phase V: Exam Day
26. Crush exam. Get A.
My favorite study motivation post
A new hour-long documentary about Vaganova Ballet Academy and its history is on it’s way. Here’s a teaser.
“Lost love is still love. It takes a different form, that’s all. You can’t see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around a dance floor. But when those senses weaken another heightens. Memory. Memory becomes your partner. You nurture it. You hold it. You dance with it.”
— Mitch Albom (via macrolit)
“For the first time in his life, he stopped worrying about results, and as a consequence the terms ‘success’ and 'failure’ had suddenly lost their meaning for him. The true purpose of art was not to create beautiful objects, he discovered. It was a method of understanding, a way of penetrating the world and finding one’s place in it, and whatever aesthetic qualities an individual canvas might have were almost an incidental by-product of the effort to engage oneself in this struggle, to enter into the thick of things.”
— Paul Auster, Moon Palace
“Art was a kind of demonic possession. Art would dance you to death. It would move in and take you over, and then destroy you.”
— Margaret Atwood, from Negotiating with the Dead; “Temptation,”
“And are you in love? And are you happy? And do you sometimes write a poem? And have you had your hair cut? And have you met anybody of such beauty your eyes dance, as the waves danced,”
— Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Quentin Bell written c. February 1930
“it burned my eyes the way you dance around in my visions on ceilings on floors: how entertaining how exhausting the way you chase me inside my own skin.”
— j. p. berame // 0718-1916
i love the term “partners”
are we dating?
are we robbing a bank?
do we run a legal firm?
are we two best friends that investigate bizarre and unordinary circumstances as members of a holistic detective agency while making questionable fashion choices and pining for one another?
who knows.
ai-papi