Let's do the cardbox again
Yesterday, I cardboxed for the first time at Furman. And it's hard to believe now that three months ago I didn't even know what a Leitner cardbox was. Nowadays I consider it the only legitimate means of studying that I regularly do. It is easier, now, for me to think of Aerolith (and its predecessor JumbleTime) as games that happen to share certain prominent but misleading features with real studying. They're like a beach vacation, whereas the cardbox is the cold, rigorous workaday world of tournament preparation. But if you had asked me a year ago, I would have said that JT was essentially all I needed. No wonder I was so markedly terrible a year ago.
I cardboxed during World Prehistory, smuggling my laptop into class. The people behind me could see what I was doing, and I know from previous experience that they often actually care, but I was not interrupted -- perhaps they were distracted by the weighty question of whether H. neanderthalensis interbred with H. sapiens 27,000 years ago. (As for me, I've resolved not to care about any evolutionary heritage question that can't be resolved with mitochondrial DNA. Makes my life too hard.) It was the first time I had cardboxed on the laptop, too, since my hard drive failed a month before. I built up a 9,000-word box on the rickety PC at home, and now, during class, I decided to start up again for the third time. This may seem slightly nuts, but if I weren't I wouldn't be playing Scrabble.
So, how did it go? Well, reviewing words from the top 1k sevens and eights (i.e. words I know already), I got 165 words correct in a row. Then I missed STOLIDER. I hadn't realized that word was a problem for me. I wonder how many times I've missed it already.
I cardboxed during World Prehistory, smuggling my laptop into class. The people behind me could see what I was doing, and I know from previous experience that they often actually care, but I was not interrupted -- perhaps they were distracted by the weighty question of whether H. neanderthalensis interbred with H. sapiens 27,000 years ago. (As for me, I've resolved not to care about any evolutionary heritage question that can't be resolved with mitochondrial DNA. Makes my life too hard.) It was the first time I had cardboxed on the laptop, too, since my hard drive failed a month before. I built up a 9,000-word box on the rickety PC at home, and now, during class, I decided to start up again for the third time. This may seem slightly nuts, but if I weren't I wouldn't be playing Scrabble.
So, how did it go? Well, reviewing words from the top 1k sevens and eights (i.e. words I know already), I got 165 words correct in a row. Then I missed STOLIDER. I hadn't realized that word was a problem for me. I wonder how many times I've missed it already.
posted by volucris at 11:22 PM
2 Comments:
JT/Aerolith *are* useful, they're just not studying. They're most useful for review, in my mind, which is best after the heavy lifting of studying is already well underway.
I think what you would say is that the cardbox IS studying. And that's certainly true. But I don't like its pace, and the only time I was able to keep up with even a 9,000-size box was in midsummer when I had absolutely nothing to do. And I found myself getting intensely frustrated at failing to do things that I DON'T ACTUALLY HAVE TO DO IN ACTUAL GAMES.
So I don't cardbox so much anymore. I use AnaHack more than anything else. It has provisions for adjusting the stress level, which is really the only difference between a cardbox and JT/Aerolith. So I can just do either, whichever I need at the time.
And, by the way, as I told booradley, in my preparation I aroint paper. That's because I'm 18. Paper is for textbooks and novels. Computers are for light novels, like Cory Doctorow, and anything down from there, including online comics, CGP and studying, which is fun. I tried studying with paper lists for a while, but quickly figured out that it was as futile -- for me, at least -- as printing out CGP digests before I read them.
Post a Comment
<< Home