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Part VI: The Part of Tens
Yeah-yeah trap #1
Yeah-yeah trap #1 happens when you study by looking through your lecture
notes over and over again, saying “yeah, I get that,” “I understand that,” and
“okay, I can do that,” but you don’t actually try the problems from scratch
totally on your own. If you understand a problem that’s already been done by
someone else, it only means you understand what that person did when they
worked the problem. It doesn’t say anything about whether you could have
done it on your own in an exam situation when the pressure is on and you’re
staring at a blank space where your answer is supposed to be. Big difference!
I fall into yeah-yeah trap #1 too. I read through my DVR (digital video record-
ing) manual from beginning to end, and it all made total sense to me. But a
week later when I went to record a movie, I had no clue how to do it. Why not?
I understood the information as I was reading along, but I didn’t try to apply it
for myself, and when the time came I couldn’t remember how to do it.
Students always tell me, “If someone sets up the problem for me, I can always
figure it out.” The problem is, almost anyone can solve a problem that’s
already been set up. In fact, the whole point is being able to set it up, and no
one is going to do that for you on an exam.
Avoid yeah-yeah trap #1 by going through your notes, pulling out a set of
examples that your professor used, and writing each one on a separate piece
of paper (just the problem, not the solution). Then mix up the papers and
make an “exam” out of them. For each problem, try to start it by writing down
just the very first step. Don’t worry about finishing the problems; just con-
centrate on starting them. After you’ve done this step for all the problems, go
back into your lecture notes and see if you started them right. (On the back of
each problem, write down where it came from in your notes so you can check
your answers faster.)
Yeah-yeah trap #2
Yeah-yeah trap #2 is even more subtle than yeah-yeah trap #1. A student
comes into my office after the exam and says, “Well I worked every problem
in the notes, I redid all the homework problems, I worked all the old exams
you posted, and I did great on all of them; I hardly got a single problem
wrong. But when I took the exam, I bombed it.”
What happened? Nine out of ten times, students in yeah-yeah trap #2 did
indeed work all those problems, and spent hours upon hours doing so. But
whenever they got stuck and couldn’t finish a problem, they peeked at the
solutions (which they kept sitting right next to them), saw where they went
wrong, said “yeah-yeah, that was a silly mistake — I knew that!” and contin-
ued on to finish the problem. In the end they thought they got the problems

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