Hit Lit! Top books of 2019

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Hit Lit! Top Books of 2019 for Learning How to Learners!

Here are the books and tools that LHTLers have found to be most useful this year (not counting our own Learning How to Learn, A Mind for Numbers, and Mindshift, which of course ranked at the top!)

• Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career
• How to Become a Straight-A Student: The Unconventional Strategies Real College Students Use to Score High While Studying Less
• Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning
• The Brave Learner: Finding Everyday Magic in Homeschool, Learning, and Life
• Remember It!: The Names of People You Meet, All of Your Passwords, Where You Left Your Keys, and Everything Else You Tend to Forget
• Genius Foods: Become Smarter, Happier, and More Productive While Protecting Your Brain for Life
• The Bottleneck Rules: How to Get More Done (When Working Harder isn’t Working)
• The Plant Paradox: The Hidden Dangers in “Healthy” Foods That Cause Disease and Weight Gain (please note that this book is NOT against vegetarianism—you can be a vegetarian and still follow some of the plans in this book)
• The Graduate Student as Writer: Encouragement for the Budding Scholar
• Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

Learning Tools

LHTLers also find the following learning tools to be perennially useful: 

• 3M Peltor Optime 105 Over the Head Earmuff, Ear Protectors, Hearing Protection, NRR 30 dB
• Palomino Blackwing Pencils (Barb’s favorites)

A video on Memes and an App to Help with Patients with Dementia

4-time US memory champion Nelson Dellis is back with a video about the origin of memes and our memories, with a little discussion of an Alzheimer’s app he is working on. (See Nelson’s great book Remember It! in our list above.)

The Overhyped College Dropout ‘Scandal’

It’s easy to read a “sky is falling!” type article about problems in academia and get sucked into the hype before your critical thinking skills kick in. This thoughtful article, “The Overhyped College Dropout ‘Scandal,’” by George Leef of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, will help you to take a step back and analyze whether or not high college dropout rates are really such a bad thing.

New Exercises for Parents and Teachers in the Learning How to Learn for Youth MOOC

Due to the popularity of the exercises for parents and teachers to help kids learn how to learn better— and the kindness of Professor Kenzen Chen of National Chiao Tung University—we’ve added some great new material to the Learning How to Learn for Youth MOOC teachers’ notes.  To access these exercises, go to any video in the MOOC, click on “Download” right beneath the video, and then download the file called “Teachers notes” (available as either pdf or Word documents).  

If you want to help your youngster(s) study more effectively and efficiently, try sitting and watching these LHTL for Youth videos together, one or two each day, during the holiday break. You’ll discover a shared vocabulary for learning that will help you to become a better coach! 

Constant Wonder podcast

Here’s Barb on the podcast Constant Wonder, talking with host Marcus Smith. Check out the other discussions on the podcast related to Napoleon’s exile on Elba and Lawrence of Arabia.  This is wide-ranging podcasting at its best.

An interactive chart that lets you explore the words used to describe male and female teachers

Type in any word or two word phrase you want into this online tool to get a sense of how often that word is used in reviews from RateMyProfessor.com, broken out by discipline and gender. This tool lets you see which disciplines are, for example, funniest.  (Sadly, Barb’s beloved engineering comes in dead last…. but education isn’t much better.) Read this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education to get a bigger sense of the tool and its implications.

Starting Is the Hardest Part—a Reflection on Procrastination

Here’s an interesting blog post from Dan Calamai that reminds of how procrastination can start—and how we can nip it in the bud.

That’s all for this week. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

• Get the course recommended text, A Mind for Numbers!
• And Learning How to Learn: How to Succeed in School Without Spending All Your Time Studying; A Guide for Kids and Teens. Great ideas for parents, too!
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