Studying social studies with my kid the other night, I came across a perfect example of what studying shouldn’t be. It reminded me of how I combated it in The Final Step.
We were covering some second-grade civics questions he was going to be tested on. Things like patriotism and symbols of the U.S.A. Comparing and contrasting a Mayor, a Governor, and a President. Those sorts of things.
We were cruising nicely through the study guide until we got to the true and false section. Suddenly he couldn’t get a single question right. After the third time through (with me explaining the right answers in between) and still no right answers, he stopped me.
“Dad, something’s wrong. I know they go True, False, False, True, False.”
He had no clue why he couldn’t get them right. He had no clue what the questions were even asking. He’d memorized the order of the answers and that was that. When I go through study guides with my kids, I always do the questions and topics out of order. I always mix them around.
When you study, sometimes you remember an answer because you can remember the page you studied it on, and that’s good. What’s bad is if you’re using a review book and you remember what answer comes next without reading the question.
That’s why I created Volume 2 of The Final Step. It comes as a PDF with your order. Volume 2 is made up of the same exact questions that are in Volume 1, but the order is al jumbled up. I basically just shuffled Volume 1 and called it Volume 2.
If you’ve used The Final Step a lot, you ought to give Vol. 2 a try and see if you really know your stuff, or you’ve been (accidentally) cheating.
Brian Wallace
