[nabs-l] skimming

[Bridgit Pollpeter]

Antonio,

I agree with you.  Skimming truly is an essential skill college students
should learn.  In fact, in most classes teaching study skills, skimming
is one of the topics broached.

I maintain a high GPA and practice skimming on a daily basis.  Yes, some
material you will want to read cover-to-cover, but not everything
especially in classes that are textbook based versus literature based
reading.

And when researching for papers and projects, you can not read each word
of each document you come across.

Finding a reliable way to skim will help students especially as they
progress through college.

And I completely agree about the comment with grad school.  Your reading
load is often extremely heavy-- almost inhuman.  *smile*  It is not even
expected for students to read an entire book or document most times.

You must do what works best for you, and what you are comfortable with,
but skimming, for many, is a crucial skill.

I understand the frustration of how different groups like RFBD format
each book.  Some have great formatting that allows for easy navigation,
but many do not.  If you use a Victor Stream (or Victoria as I call
mine) bookmarking will become your best friend.  The time jump option is
helpful too.

Sometimes, I mark down a small note so I can easily identify what
certain bookmarks are for.

A lot of this is figuring out what works for you.  You will develop your
own tools and methods as you progress.

And don't worry, skimming does not necessarily adversly affect your
grade.  It is all how you handle situation from situation, and also what
each instructor expects from you.

Bridgit

Message: 8
Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2011 22:28:56 -0400
From: "Antonio M. Guimaraes Jr." <freethaught at gmail.com>
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
	<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] skimming
Message-ID: <BA5E2039-0C91-4CBF-AF1E-269ECD703A25 at gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

Disagree,

Students learn better, think more critically, and extrac the excential
information from interaction with text, and not even the simple act of
reading and taking notes. Notes serve me only to rewrite what I need to
learn. Interaction allowes greater participation, better attention, and
superior comprehention of a material.

Text books are not written as novels, and jumping throu paragraphs
allowes one to decide what to read, and what to skip. I want to learn
what I want to learn and not have to sit for weeks trying to get every
detail down for a test that will only require a specific set of
knowledge and information.

Further more, a paper requires research, and students, even need to plow
though hundrest of pages from douzens of articles just to decide what to
write, and how to write it.

Now imagine having to read every single word of every single article you
think may have something in it for you.

I would rather read critically than to read continuously.

Antonio Guimaraes


On Mar 15, 2011, at 9:25 PM, Jedi wrote:

> It is true that sighted students often skip a lot of material. But the
advantage in not being able to do that exactly as the sighted do is that
you learn more. I usually have top grades in my classes, and I really do
think it's because I have to read through more material than my peers
do. After all, it is difficult to know exactly what material is not
really required unless the professor spells it out for you. So the
consequences of skipping through stuff might be that you don't get what
you need from the material.
> 
> Respectfully,
> Jedi