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Madhuopen lab

§6 · Learn

Books written to be kept, not skimmed.

3 courses, 112 chapters, about 31 hours of reading. Every chapter opens with a question to guess at, keeps a tutor in the margin who has read it, and ends by asking you for one sentence of your own. 1509 recall cards bring the ideas back on a schedule, sooner when you miss.

Guess first

Each chapter opens with one of its own recall questions. A wrong guess before reading makes the right answer stick harder than no guess at all.

A tutor in the margin

Ask the tutor anything, or select a sentence and ask about that. It has read the chapter, uses the chapter's own analogies, and will not invent what the book does not say.

One sentence of your own

At the end you write what the chapter was about, from memory. It is graded against the author's takeaways, and you see what you had and what you missed.

Spaced recall

Every takeaway becomes a card. A miss comes back tomorrow; a confident hit waits longer each time. Sure-and-wrong is recorded, because it is the most expensive kind of not knowing.

Your recall queue →