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"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."
Skills Aristotle
Organization
Writing Good organization is the main ingredient of success. If you do not already
Public Speaking have habits of good organization, make it a high priority to obtain them, in your
Historical Thinking thinking, reading, notetaking, notekeeping, and use of your time. The
Framing question successful person is the individual who forms the habit of doing what the
Research failing person doesn't like to do.
Source evaluation
Analysis
Thinking: Using a Tripartite Conceptual Structure
Conclusion
Citation
To understand something is to grasp its essentials. You should be able to
Key Concepts
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
Content Areas this generalization by explaining each of its main components, and then, on
French Rev. & Nap. their components, and so forth.
Germany in 19C
Italy in 19C The best mental scaffolding for the development of your knowledge is a
Russian Rev. & Lenin pyramid structure. Support your single-sentence take-away generalization by
World War I coming up with three main points of evidence or justification. Then support the
Italy, 1919-1945 supports by giving each of them three supports, and so on.
Germany, 1919-1945
Interwar Diplomacy Three is the right number of supports for a generalization because four
World War II supports are too many to be remembered, and two supports make your case
Middle East, 1914-49 seem weak and precarious. ("It takes three facts to make a truth."Eugene
China Manlove Rhodes)
Japan
War, 2015-16 The pyramid principle, or three-part structure for understanding and
War, 2016-17 communication, has been accepted and used for centuries by experts in
Auth States, 2015-16 education and communication. It underlies the Five paragraph essay we
Auth States, 2016-17 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
IB History organize your own thinking, and all your communications.

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IB History Program
IB Assessments
Reading
Historical Investigation
Extended Essay
Reading regularly and deeply is indispensable to becoming an independent
Paper 1
thinker. ("Anyone who is going to make anything out of history will, sooner or
Paper 2
later, have to do most of the work himself. He will have to read, and consider,
Paper 3
and reconsider, and then read some more. Geoffrey Barraclough)
Preparing IB exams

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

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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 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

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but well-organized binder.

Time organization

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

Sources

"Study: You Really Can 'Work Smarter, Not Harder' ". Nanette Fondas. The
Atlantic Online, May 15 2014, 8:00 AM ET
Research shows that reflecting after learning something new makes it
stick in your brain.

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