| How to Be Smarter |
or How to Be an Outstanding IB Student |
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1. Look for questions
a. Train yourself to look for questions rather than leaping quickly to answers
b. Actively search out an area of your subject where there are no clear and obvious answers—look for something that needs explaining rather than reiterate the obvious
c. Begin with something you don’t understand very well and want to understand better
2. Suspect your first responses
a. Settling for you first response makes your thinking superficial, obvious, and overly general
b. First responses can leave you blind to rival explanations
c. Examine your first response for ways in which it is inaccurate
d. Generally, smarter people propose and reject ideas ten times or more before they arrive at an angle or an approach that will sustain an essay, an experiment, a report, a project
3. Expect to become interested
a. Cultivate your curiosity by thinking like an explorer
b. Give yourself and your subject the benefit of the doubt
c. Expect interest to come, and it will
d. Suspend judgment and you will uncover interests where you had not seen them before
e. Remember that interest is often a product of writing, not a prerequisite
f. Banish the word “boring” from your vocabulary—people who are easily bored and not afraid to say so reveal more about themselves than the subject matter in which they find no interest
4. Write all of the time about what you’re studying, and you
a. will become an active consumer of ideas and information
b. will have more ideas and information to think actively with and about
c. will remember more and will develop a more sophisticated intellect
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