Note-taking is a skill that can help you do well in all your schoolwork. It can make you confident when you are studying. But unluckily, most students don’t know how to take notes. Here are some suggestions.

Write down key facts. If your teacher writes notes on the blackboard, that’s great. You can copy them or write down the most important facts of all in class. Different teachers do things differently. For example, some teachers may focus on (关注) lots of dates and facts in class, but they only write the important ones on the blackboard. Other teachers may not write anything down, but they may say something important again and again.

Ask. Don’t be afraid to ask your teacher to repeat what you’ve missed. If your teacher speaks too fast and you can’t follow what he or she is saying, you can ask him or her after class.

Compare. Comparing your notes with classmates’ can be good for your learning. It can also help you and your classmates correct some mistakes.

Organize. Note-taking also needs organization. Keep notes for each subject in one notebook so that you can find everything easily when a test comes.

Good note-taking takes time. If you decide to recopy your notes every evening, you’ll surely have less time to watch TV. But you’ll save time in the coming test.

Language students often think they have memory problems. They worry because they can’t remember words. In fact, the problem usually isn’t with their memory. The problem is with how they study.

To remember word better, you need to understand how memory works. There are two kinds of memory: short-term and long-term. When you see, hear or read something. It goes first into short-term memory. But short-term memory lasts for only a few seconds. You will only remember something longer if it goes into long-term memory. Your long-term memory is like a very big library with many, many books. And like a library, it's organized. When you put away a book-or memory- you can’t just leave it anywhere. You have to choose a place where you can find it again.

How can you do this with vocabulary? The answer is to work with the word and think about the word in new ways. You can do this by writing new sentences that include it. Even better, you can invent a little story about the word, with people or places that you know. Another way is to make a picture in your mind with the word. For example, if the word is “height”, you can think of the tallest person you know and try to guess his or her height. All of these activities are good ways to think about words. They make the meaning of words stronger in your long-term memory. And they give a way to find a word when you need it.