A refrain I often hear from people regarding my scientific and skeptic mindset is how cynical I’m being. They tell me I’m just shooting down anything that I cannot see proven in an equation or carried out in some sort of lab experiment. Since I can rarely get that kind of validation, I always seem to hold negative views of new ideas.

As a student, you’re responsible for a fair amount of material from the various classes you’re taking. Whether that’s a bunch of facts concerning a part of world history or the way to prove the equivalent capacitance of capacitors arranged in series and parallel, it can be difficult to keep all of it in one’s mind while tests loom ever closer.

I have a bad habit when receiving an exam that is graded: instead of looking at my errors and trying to figure out what I could have done better, I simply try to put the whole exam out of mind.

When I first began my CÉGEP mathematics courses, one of the things I noticed that was new was how my teacher would give “motivation” to what we’re doing. Basically, the idea was to give us a reason for why we were doing something, instead of just throwing it out in the blue.