#3 -- FINALLY getting the hang of APUSH

Yea.

Well kind of.

It's still a very challenging course. I've got to say that A- is, well, the second to the best that anyone can hope for. With the new semester, greater expectations (always welcome), but also my own experiences with essay writing and efficiency in this course, I'll take a shot at that A.

So far going great.

However, with the latest. ... performances outside of school, I must say that this catch-up work is not what I need right now.

Hopefully I can do well on the upcoming essay!

Anyways, as I was catching up on my reading and notetaking I've discovered that my notes were strangely shorter than previous chapters, when the chapters were roughly of equal length. But then, my grades weren't falling.

Wow.

It seems like that in APUSH, you want to develop an effective filter. What do I mean by that? Well in The American Pageant for example, it is a college level textbook. The author is going to be directing the focus on college undergrads.

What does this mean? This means a jumble of metaphors, allusions that high schoolers seldom understand, vocabulary, as well as too much information. Then of course, you'll realize that there are just too many details that it's impossible to account for the unimportant ones. You'll need focus.

That's right. You'll want a filter that filters out all the above. Previously I wanted to know everything and felt really bad when I couldn't take a certain detail down. You'll want to be able to distinguish the important details from the unimportant ones ... unless of course, you are a super brainiac.

Before, I did attempt to account for all the details. But then reality pretty much socked me in the eye. It really was a better grade in APUSH and getting the larger concepts at hand, or an impaired understanding of the great themes and knowing small details that doesn't have a part in the big picture.

Big picture -- that's what you want to focus on. The themes.

If you see my notes, you can definitely see that they've changed much. They've decreased in length. The minor details that probably would only appear in trivia (darn, but I'm in the quiz team!) doesn't obscure/impede the person from realizing the big picture.

Now my notes are much more concise!

I love this. It did take me quite some time to get it so it's vital for all to understand it at first. Of course they did tell us to do that when we took our first APUSH class.

I didn't really get what they meant until now.

This is great! That's another obstacle removed :).