by Michael Skinner

Created on: August 03, 2009   Last Updated: June 29, 2010

Start a life long habit of study and contemplation on Sunday morning. If you are religious then go church. If you are simply spiritual find a nice peaceful place in the great outdoors to spend an hour or so in peaceful contemplation. This sort of thing is necessary to recharge the batteries. Also take at least 30 minutes or so on Sundays to read some spiritual text that has nothing to do with your studies. If you examine the lives of everyone you have ever read about who went crazy, jumped off the deep end and did regrettable things to themselves and others, you will often find that they were trapped in their own heads and had little or no spiritual grounding. By trapped in their own heads we mean they were circling their problems and concerns like vultures waiting for something to die. It is not healthy for a human to live that way. Getting out of your own head is necessary for good mental health. This is also where good friends come in.

Drinking binges should be scheduled for Friday night after the last class. A good drunk never mixes his liquor. Unless you want to give an extended performance before the altar of the porcelain God Ralph, invoking his Holy name continuously, don't mix beer and wine, or beer, wine and strong spirits. Actually let's be honest. A good drunk never gets drunk. What you are looking for is a buzz to take edge off. Once you hit that switch to soda. Never indulge in drinking games with your friends. If they insist, get new friends. You can read about the old ones in the paper. Oh look, they killed someone and ruined their lives.

Saturday is for beach parties and road trips. Plan to travel with the friends and forget your troubles. Never make the trip out longer than four hours or so. Figure four hours there, four hours back, four hours to party. If possible, don't take alcohol or buy any while you are there. Make a habit of consuming alcohol only in places where you do not need to drive to get home.

Now we are at Sunday wherein you shall spend the morning in peaceful spiritual contemplation and recovering from your hangover. Spend the afternoon and evening doing that homework and studying for those tests. On those rare, rare occasions that you don't have any school work to do or you already finished it, it's time to study ahead. Your plan to get through school with as little pain as possible should be to already know what you need to know before you need to know it. If you are going to be taking a course on explaining the underpinnings of Newtonian Calculus next fall, look up all the proofs on Google now. Now what upper limits, lower limits, exterema, and infinitesimals are. Know how to determine if a function is smooth, continuous and differentiable over given space. Nothing prevents you from knowing all these things before hand. Taking the class should mostly be about acing finals and getting that good grade.

Think of it this way, why do the hardest studying in the least amount of time under the greatest pressure? In other words, why bust your ass while taking the class. Why not learn at your leisure and at your pace? Why not learn what you want to learn when you want to learn it? A class should just be validation that you know what you know.

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