Stefanie Weisman

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Memorization has gotten a bad rap recently. Lots of students, and even some educators, say that being able to reason is more important than knowing facts; and besides, why bother committing things to memory when you've got Google? My response to this - after I've finished inwardly groaning - is that of course reasoning is important, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't know facts as well. It's not like you have to choose between one or the other. Besides, facts give you a foundation on which to reason about things

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High school and college students like to torture their bodies. They pull countless all-nighters, continually skip breakfast, eat nothing but ramen noodles for dinner, find creative new ways to guzzle alcohol, transform into couch potatoes, and gain 15 pounds at the freshman dinner buffet. At least, that's the stereotype

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Forget physics, forget organic chem, forget reading James Joyce's Ulysses - organizing your time is one of the biggest challenges you'll face in your academic career

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Ah, group projects. Some people love 'em, some people hate 'em - okay, most people hate 'em. Your grade now depends on other people whom you may never have met before, and you've somehow got to do the impossible: find some time when a bunch of super-busy high school or college students can actually meet in person

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In my freshman and sophomore years of college, I read dozens of books by the great thinkers of Western civilization. From Plato to Nietzsche, Homer to Shakespeare - you name it, I read it. At times it drove me crazy - picture reading hundreds of pages that sound like this every week: "All rational knowledge is either material and concerned with some object, or formal and concerned only with the form of understanding and of reason themselves and with the universal rules of thought in general without regard to differences of its objects." Come again, Kant?