How to Read Your Math Text

Most math texts these days are written to make big bucks for the publishers and the authors.  In fact, take a look here to see what kind of house the best selling author of textbooks in the US lives in.    These books are not written to be read or studied.  Instead they are mostly collections of examples and problems, with little requirement that students think.  Instead, they teach excellent page-flipping and search skills, diving into the pockets of students with worthless version updates for ever more CASH!

But I digress.

If you are lucky enough to have a math text that actually was written to be read by students (like my lucky students this semester at the University of San Diego – they are reading Calculus by Gilbert Strang !), then I have some important safety tips for you to digest before you even open the book.

0. Read the text before class, to be better at absorbing the material as your teacher presents and interprets it.

1.  Make sure you understand, really get, each sentence, before you go on to the next one.  In math more than anything else, if you don’t understand the beginning, you won’t get the middle, and you won’t have a prayer at the end.

2. Write in your book!  Note especially sections that are confusing or that you don’t understand.  Take these questions to:

- other sharp students who are doing well in the class
- section or TA
- professors office hours

do what you have to do to get them answered!

3. Using a piece of paper and a pencil (lose the ballpoint, buckwheat!), make up little examples of what you are reading.  Make sure what it says is true. This pulls the learning into the active frontal lobe, executive portion of your brain, instead of the passive part.  Try to work the ideas in your head like you were lifting weights in the gym.  See if you can feel the burn.

4. Outline the ideas of what you are reading in a separate notebook or journal.  This is NOT copy the text.  This is just list the essential ideas, and how they connect.  The connections between the ideas and the neurons in your brain are much more closely related than you might think.