Organization

Overview
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." Aristotle

Good organization is the main ingredient of success. If you do not already have habits of good organization, make it a high priority to obtain them, in your thinking, reading, notetaking, notekeeping, and use of your time. “The successful person is the individual who forms the habit of doing what the failing person doesn't like to do.”

Thinking: Using a Tripartite Conceptual Structure
To understand something is to grasp its essentials. You should be able to encapsulate your learning about a topic in a single sentence if required. The depth of your knowledge is then measured by how much you can expand on this generalization by explaining each of its main components, and then, on their components, and so forth.

The best mental scaffolding for the development of your knowledge is a pyramid structure. Support your single-sentence “take-away” generalization by coming up with three main points of evidence or justification. Then support the supports by giving each of them three supports, and so on.

Three is the right number of supports for a generalization because four supports are too many to be remembered, and two supports make your case seem weak and precarious. ("It takes three facts to make a truth."–Eugene Manlove Rhodes)

The “pyramid principle”, or three-part structure for understanding and communication, has been accepted and used for centuries by experts in education and communication. It underlies the “Five paragraph essay” we learn to write at WFS (introduction, three supporting paragraphs, conclusion).

You should learn to apply this principle in all of the documents you use to organize your own thinking, and all your communications.

Reading
Reading regularly and deeply is indispensable to becoming an independent thinker. ("Anyone who is going to make anything out of history will, sooner or later, have to do most of the work himself. He will have to read, and consider, and reconsider, and then read some more.” Geoffrey Barraclough)

For the sake of your future roles as workers and as citizens, all of you need to learn to read quickly and efficiently. Many of you do not read unless you have to, and many others don't read non-fiction. You will only do so with ease and pleasure if you get reasonably efficient at it. As with anything else, practice is key: practice in reading every day, and in reading in a structured, critical way.

I recommend you learn and apply “smart reading” techniques, such as “pre-reading”, and focusing on the portions that address our guiding questions. Consult my History-Schmistory documents “Reading Difficult Material” and “Working Smart, More than Hard” (the latter, primarily for HEM students) for details about how to do this.

If you find it difficult to complete nightly reading assignments, try keeping track of your reading (not necessarily just assigned reading), in the "Reading Record" form. This form can be used to pinpoint exactly where it is that you need help, or more effort.

Notetaking
Reading and listening intelligently means doing so actively, which means taking notes. Your learning during class should also be captured in notes. This will be the core of the homework in this class. I summarize the related requirements in a separate, course-specific policies document, “Homework”, and in the section “Working Smart More than Hard”.

It is also important that our learning during class be captured in notes. Whenever I give a presentation, I will try to supply printed presentation notes with a copy of the material that I present. In this way, I relieve students of most of the recording task involved. You should use this same document to take notes of key points that come out in my verbal presentation, or in discussion.

Excerpt of a letter from an alum:
 * //Dear Mr. Ergueta, I just wanted to keep in touch. I am at [major university] for five weeks this summer taking a class and getting acclimated to the environment, before the fall semester starts. My class is international relations class. We mostly do a lot of reading and a lot of notetaking. It kind of reminds me of your history class, except instead of 15 pages of reading each night we have about 100. The reading is very dense, and I find I have to take two or three pages of organized notes to really understand it well. Then, I have to summarize the notes from my readings into something that's manageable the study from. In this respect your classroom really really helped me. I learned how to take good notes from difficult readings, but I also learned I would have to summarize those notes into something manageable that I could study from and commit to memory. Your charts are my inspiration.//

Materials organization
To prevent notes and handouts from simply piling up in a disorderly and confusing manner over the course of the year, you will need to develop good habits of digital and physical organization.

I am providing you with guidelines and other learning resources relevant to the study of history in this “History-Schmistory” website. I suggest you use this website as a central repository of “how-to” information about history. If you find a resource that you would like to add to those already there, you can and may do so, in an appropriate location on the site, simply by clicking on “edit” and uploading the document. To allow this is one of the main reasons that I use the wiki engine as the technological basis of this website.

“History-Schmistory” is a publicly accessible site, open to anyone, unlike our class wiki, which is open to you only by my invitation, and which will no longer be open to you after the end of the course year. I hope to maintain “History-Schmistory”, and keep it open to anyone, as long as I am teaching. So these resources should be available to you during your senior year, when you have to take the IB exam, and even when you are in college and taking further history courses.

On the other hand, the “E-HEM” or “20C” wiki websites will not be available to you beyond the year of these courses. So if you anticipate a future use for information from these courses, because you plan to take the IB exams, or because you plan to study history in the future, you should create your own digital repository of these resources. This could be a folder within your own Mac, but probably a better idea would be to create a folder on some suitable remote server, like Google Drive or iCloud or DropBox. This would protect your information against loss from theft or destruction of your Mac hard drive.

Good digital organization and storage habits need to be complemented by similar habits with regard to physical course materials. You should keep a “current” binder dedicated to this history course, and most people find that it needs to be a thick one (more than 1 ½ inches in depth). At the very least it should store your reading and viewing notes, which I will check in class, so you should plan to bring that binder to class every day. You do not have to bring textbooks to class.

Most students choose also to print and store readings, maps, and other resources, and not rely only on the online versions of these. If you do this, you need to give your binder a good clear organization, into sections divided by tabs.

At the end of each unit, I recommend you go through the materials and discard materials that you know you will not use again. Then archive the unit materials from your history binder by removing them and storing them neatly at home, perhaps in a back-up binder or folder. Start the new unit with a clear but well-organized binder.

Time organization
There is no time like now to habituate yourself to being punctual.