Here is the content without timestamps and formatted into clean paragraphs:

Class. Obviously we don't want that. So a few things that we can talk about when it comes to in-
class technique. Now one of the things that people generally underestimate is the power of pre-
study and learning a little bit of material beforehand. And I'm not talking about getting a full
understanding of the entire topic before you sit in class, so that you're not even needing to listen
to what the teacher says, or what the lecturer says at your university.

What I'm talking about is simply getting a familiarization with a few basic elements of the topic,
so we know how to think about this. And so the in-class performance is actually really
significantly impacted by how familiar you are with the content. So for example, if I put you in a
fourth year university lecture, you are probably not going to follow along very well unless you're
in fourth year above university.

However, if I put you in a year eight class, even if you technically forgot what you learned in
year eight, it's going to be very easy for you to pick up on it, because you have so much other
knowledge that's related to it. So when you learn something new, it's like, oh, that's kind of
obvious, because you get related to so many other things. This is an idea that we're actually
going to talk about and elaborate on a lot more coming up. But one of the first things that you
can do is train yourself to do a topic level pre-study.

We take the entire topic of what you might be learning for the next, you know, maybe a few
weeks, even, and you just try to isolate one of the three or four main ideas. And they may be the
same as what your teacher tells you, they may be the same as what's in a study guide, or
whatever other resource you have available. It doesn't really matter. All you may find, actually,
there's another way of grouping a together. There may be seven main concepts that you find in
your resources.

But when you really think about it, you might think, you know what? This one and this one are
kind of the same sort of thing. It's sort of talking about the same thing. So I challenge you to find
just three or four main ideas. And working with students from the range of curriculums within,
not only Australia and New Zealand, but also within university levels, and, you know, IB, which
is obviously international, multiple other countries, I've never really found a situation where the
topic couldn't be broken up into roughly three or four main concepts, or groups of concepts and
basic ideas. So that's what you need to do in the pre-study. You're not aiming to read and learn
absolutely everything about everything.

Okay, what is the main idea here? So for, let's say, three weeks of class material, which is, you
know, the entire topic, let's say, Normally, doing it this way, you might only spend 30 minutes to
one hour. So you spend 30 minutes to an hour just reading through all the different, you know,
class material, election material, or whatever it is in there on the topic. And then by the end of
that, you're able to say, okay, so this is a topic that really talks about these three or four main
ideas.

And then on top of that, you want to think about how do those ideas kind of relate to each other?
What's the relationship between them? You want to say, all right, this is a topic which talks about
this idea of A and how without it, you really can't get B. But then because of it, you get C
occurring and then D happens. So a few ideas and a relationship or flow of ideas between those
basic groups of concepts or concepts. And the reason this is so beneficial is because it primes
your brain.

And priming is a proper terminology to use here, in that it gives your brain a way of thinking
about this to help it make sense of what you're learning class. So when you learn something in
class, now there's an anchor point that it can attach to. You can think, oh, this is new information,
but I can see how it is kind of related to this. It gives the information a place to belong.

And when we learn more about the learning psychology, we see how that can drastically change
that slope of the forgetting curve that we talked about before and can increase your retention by a
lot. So it's incredibly powerful technique that you can use. It's very easy to do. You don't have to
stress too much about it. Like I said, just 30 minutes to an hour, going through an entire topic's
worth of content, just figuring out the main ideas and groups of ideas and how they're related to
each other. And then take that knowledge with you into your class and you will find that the class
starts to make a little bit more sense.

And hopefully, you start having a few more questions about what the teacher is saying, which is
a sign that you are activating more innate, curiosity-driven learning processes, which are
actually, from a neuro-psychology point of view, more effective and increase your retention
compared to other things that are not curiosity-driven like road learning. So that was the first
thing, which is just doing a little bit of basic pre-reading or priming for the three or four main
ideas and the relationship between them.

The second thing that we can do, now, this is truly when you're sitting there in class, is always
make sure to paraphrase what's being said. Now, a little bit of a disclaimer here, this particular
technique about paraphrasing, we're actually very quickly going to start upgrading that, because
there's a lot of stages that we can upgrade this towards and it gets more and more efficient as
time goes on.

But in the early stages, if you're not already, and I know a lot of you will be, but if you're not
already, make sure that you're not just copying verbatim. So there is research that says that
people that copy verbatim, and verbatim means word for word, they have a lower level of
retention and their test results and exam results are actually worse. And this is another reason
why typing your notes is actually not very effective, and as a result, your notes end up being
more word for word.

And so the closer it is to being word for word, the lower the level of retention, and this is actually
what's called passive learning, and you may have heard of the difference between passive versus
active learning. Passive learning means that your brain is not really switched on, and so even
though you're taking notes, there's not really any learning going on in here, it's just like a
mindless activity, like, and if you're like washing dishes and you're already paying attention,
you're just kind of doing the action, that's sort of what's going on, is that you're sitting there,
you're listening and you're writing stuff down, there's no real learning going on in your head.

And yes, you can go and take that information and learn it properly afterwards, if you don't have
much content to study, or if you have a lot of time available for you during the week, then that's
fine, but what you'll find and what the university students out there will know is that it's not
really possible at a university level, especially for more difficult content, or even if you're doing
a difficult type of curriculum in high school, or a difficult subject, information is usually thrown
at you quite quickly, you've got a lot of stuff to study, and if you need to then spend time
afterwards to study it again, to actually understand and gain proper learning from that, that is a
lot of time wasted, which you're not going to be able to afford.

And even if you can afford it, I would personally rather spend that time, you know, socializing or
playing games or picking up new hobbies, or just sleeping more, like saying hi to my mom, or
something like that. There's better ways to use that time. And so you don't want your words to be
verbatim, you want to make sure you're always paraphrasing, and if possible paraphrase to the
simplest and most concise form as is possible for you, and you should feel mentally, there's a bit
of a challenge here, and that's a good sign, you should feel that man, this is requiring quite a lot
of concentration for me to take this information and really condense it down and really quickly
make notes of it.

If you feel that, that's actually a good sign, because it means that the time spent in class is
contributing towards increasing your attention, and it's also a foundation skill that you need to
develop, otherwise you're really going to struggle with a lot of more efficient techniques out
there when it comes to note-taking, because worth-a-word note-taking caps off in efficiency very,
very. So we covered number one, the idea of pre-study in that very specific way, topic wide, not
listen wide, and then number two, the idea of being much more active and engaged with your
learning through extreme paraphrasing as much as possible, and not typing your notes.

And again, there's gonna be study gurus out there that say that's not the case, but you know what,
they probably can't justify their recommendation, they probably will just say, oh it's much faster
for me to type than Mr. Wright, well I'm telling you, it's much faster for you to learn by not
typing, than it is to type and get notes done without having actually learned anything, and not
only is there research on this, but you ask any of the students in our community, they will know
what we're talking about, because they will have felt the difference that it makes when you
haven't picked it. Freehand note taking strategy.

And on that note, we move on to point number three, is try to represent some ideas or
relationships between ideas with arrows and spatial arrangement. So the thing is that you can
actually represent a lot of information without having to write it. So I want you to imagine
something like this, A leads to B, and then B leads to C and D. So we have A and B leading to C
and D.

If we were to represent that in a mind map or a flow chart, or using arrows and spatial
arrangement, we would say, okay A is a pretty big topic, I'm gonna put it right here, B is a pretty
big topic, I'm gonna put it right here, C is a little mini piece, I can put it right in the middle, and I
can put D directly underneath it. And when you look at the page, you're gonna see A, B, little C,
and then D. And you'll see the flow of information going down the page.
That actually gives you a lot of information, and it uses a different part of your brain, which is
involved in spatial arrangement of things. This is why sometimes you can remember where on
your notes information is, but you don't actually remember what it is in itself. Or you remember
generally the position of items in your room or something, but you don't actually remember
exactly where it is.

Your brain's ability to process information in space, on the page, position of things on the page,
actually provides it with a lot more cues, that allows you to record that information much more
easily, and increases your retention. Now when we add arrows into the mix, it makes it even
easier, because let's say the relationship between A to B and C to D, in words, we would have to
say, A is a process that allows B to occur, which leads to C, and once C is occurred, D is able to
occur.

That's quite a long list of things, and when you write it, the only way that you can really process
that information is to read it from start to finish. You can't really look at entire paragraph and just
instantaneously take that information in. Visual processing is tens of thousands of times faster
than your ability to process written words. So if you have A arrow, B arrow, C plus D, that
communicates the relationship almost exactly the same way, and you're not really losing any
details there, nothing that was actually really meaningful at all, but your ability to take that in,
and also to revise it as much faster, because when you look at your notes, you will be able to
process, take that information in, and work with it literally tens of thousands of times faster than
if you were to read things.

This is actually something that we already know. For example, if you've ever read Lord of the
Rings, they dare not to spend like an entire page describing a single door. When you watch Lord
of the Rings in a movie, you just see the door, and you think that's quite a fancy door, and you
know about the door and the character, The picture speaks a thousand words. Actually, the
picture speaks like 10,000 words.

And if you're writing 10,000 words with something that can be represented with arrows and
spatial arrangement to form kind of a picture type understanding, you are going to be able to
study that much faster. And again, this is something that students often find very difficult when
they enter into university, because they're so used to writing everything out. So it's a good thing
to start breaking away from this early on. It's very easy to do, take it to a level that you're
comfortable with.
I'm not saying replace everything that you're writing with these crazy diagrams or anything like
that. What I'm saying is that when you see there's a certain relationship, instead of writing it as a
paragraph or a list, you think, can I express this through some arrows or a mini-mime map? Is
there another way that I can represent this information? It will make it a bit visually clearer for
me to see and make kind of a bit of a story or a flow or an image out of it. Always think about
that and start getting used to it.

And earlier you practice this, easier will be to transition into some of the high power, high
efficiency techniques that we're going BEAT later on. So, so far we've got pre-study, we've got
the idea of active learning through paraphrasing, and also now not only just paraphrasing, but
introducing the idea of this visual element, arrows, and spatial arrangement as well. Now again,
you don't have to be perfect at this. What I want you to do is give it a go. I want you to
experiment with it. I want you to try, feel it out. Don't worry if you feel like it's not giving you
the perfect result.

The most important thing is that you give it a go, you see how you find it, and if there's
something that you think you can do to improve, give that a go as well. You're not going to fail.

__
Here is the content without timestamps and formatted into clean paragraphs:

Class. Obviously we don't want that. So a few things that we can talk about when it comes to in-
class technique. Now one of the things that people generally underestimate is the power of pre-
study and learning a little bit of material beforehand. And I'm not talking about getting a full
understanding of the entire topic before you sit in class, so that you're not even needing to listen
to what the teacher says, or what the lecturer says at your university.

What I'm talking about is simply getting a familiarization with a few basic elements of the topic,
so we know how to think about this. And so the in-class performance is actually really
significantly impacted by how familiar you are with the content. So for example, if I put you in a
fourth year university lecture, you are probably not going to follow along very well unless you're
in fourth year above university.
However, if I put you in a year eight class, even if you technically forgot what you learned in
year eight, it's going to be very easy for you to pick up on it, because you have so much other
knowledge that's related to it. So when you learn something new, it's like, oh, that's kind of
obvious, because you get related to so many other things. This is an idea that we're actually
going to talk about and elaborate on a lot more coming up. But one of the first things that you
can do is train yourself to do a topic level pre-study.

We take the entire topic of what you might be learning for the next, you know, maybe a few
weeks, even, and you just try to isolate one of the three or four main ideas. And they may be the
same as what your teacher tells you, they may be the same as what's in a study guide, or
whatever other resource you have available. It doesn't really matter. All you may find, actually,
there's another way of grouping a together. There may be seven main concepts that you find in
your resources.

But when you really think about it, you might think, you know what? This one and this one are
kind of the same sort of thing. It's sort of talking about the same thing. So I challenge you to find
just three or four main ideas. And working with students from the range of curriculums within,
not only Australia and New Zealand, but also within university levels, and, you know, IB, which
is obviously international, multiple other countries, I've never really found a situation where the
topic couldn't be broken up into roughly three or four main concepts, or groups of concepts and
basic ideas. So that's what you need to do in the pre-study. You're not aiming to read and learn
absolutely everything about everything.

Okay, what is the main idea here? So for, let's say, three weeks of class material, which is, you
know, the entire topic, let's say, Normally, doing it this way, you might only spend 30 minutes to
one hour. So you spend 30 minutes to an hour just reading through all the different, you know,
class material, election material, or whatever it is in there on the topic. And then by the end of
that, you're able to say, okay, so this is a topic that really talks about these three or four main
ideas.

And then on top of that, you want to think about how do those ideas kind of relate to each other?
What's the relationship between them? You want to say, all right, this is a topic which talks about
this idea of A and how without it, you really can't get B. But then because of it, you get C
occurring and then D happens. So a few ideas and a relationship or flow of ideas between those
basic groups of concepts or concepts. And the reason this is so beneficial is because it primes
your brain.
And priming is a proper terminology to use here, in that it gives your brain a way of thinking
about this to help it make sense of what you're learning class. So when you learn something in
class, now there's an anchor point that it can attach to. You can think, oh, this is new information,
but I can see how it is kind of related to this. It gives the information a place to belong.

And when we learn more about the learning psychology, we see how that can drastically change
that slope of the forgetting curve that we talked about before and can increase your retention by a
lot. So it's incredibly powerful technique that you can use. It's very easy to do. You don't have to
stress too much about it. Like I said, just 30 minutes to an hour, going through an entire topic's
worth of content, just figuring out the main ideas and groups of ideas and how they're related to
each other. And then take that knowledge with you into your class and you will find that the class
starts to make a little bit more sense.

And hopefully, you start having a few more questions about what the teacher is saying, which is
a sign that you are activating more innate, curiosity-driven learning processes, which are
actually, from a neuro-psychology point of view, more effective and increase your retention
compared to other things that are not curiosity-driven like road learning. So that was the first
thing, which is just doing a little bit of basic pre-reading or priming for the three or four main
ideas and the relationship between them.

The second thing that we can do, now, this is truly when you're sitting there in class, is always
make sure to paraphrase what's being said. Now, a little bit of a disclaimer here, this particular
technique about paraphrasing, we're actually very quickly going to start upgrading that, because
there's a lot of stages that we can upgrade this towards and it gets more and more efficient as
time goes on.

But in the early stages, if you're not already, and I know a lot of you will be, but if you're not
already, make sure that you're not just copying verbatim. So there is research that says that
people that copy verbatim, and verbatim means word for word, they have a lower level of
retention and their test results and exam results are actually worse. And this is another reason
why typing your notes is actually not very effective, and as a result, your notes end up being
more word for word.
And so the closer it is to being word for word, the lower the level of retention, and this is actually
what's called passive learning, and you may have heard of the difference between passive versus
active learning. Passive learning means that your brain is not really switched on, and so even
though you're taking notes, there's not really any learning going on in here, it's just like a
mindless activity, like, and if you're like washing dishes and you're already paying attention,
you're just kind of doing the action, that's sort of what's going on, is that you're sitting there,
you're listening and you're writing stuff down, there's no real learning going on in your head.

And yes, you can go and take that information and learn it properly afterwards, if you don't have
much content to study, or if you have a lot of time available for you during the week, then that's
fine, but what you'll find and what the university students out there will know is that it's not
really possible at a university level, especially for more difficult content, or even if you're doing
a difficult type of curriculum in high school, or a difficult subject, information is usually thrown
at you quite quickly, you've got a lot of stuff to study, and if you need to then spend time
afterwards to study it again, to actually understand and gain proper learning from that, that is a
lot of time wasted, which you're not going to be able to afford.

And even if you can afford it, I would personally rather spend that time, you know, socializing or
playing games or picking up new hobbies, or just sleeping more, like saying hi to my mom, or
something like that. There's better ways to use that time. And so you don't want your words to be
verbatim, you want to make sure you're always paraphrasing, and if possible paraphrase to the
simplest and most concise form as is possible for you, and you should feel mentally, there's a bit
of a challenge here, and that's a good sign, you should feel that man, this is requiring quite a lot
of concentration for me to take this information and really condense it down and really quickly
make notes of it.

If you feel that, that's actually a good sign, because it means that the time spent in class is
contributing towards increasing your attention, and it's also a foundation skill that you need to
develop, otherwise you're really going to struggle with a lot of more efficient techniques out
there when it comes to note-taking, because worth-a-word note-taking caps off in efficiency very,
very. So we covered number one, the idea of pre-study in that very specific way, topic wide, not
listen wide, and then number two, the idea of being much more active and engaged with your
learning through extreme paraphrasing as much as possible, and not typing your notes.

And again, there's gonna be study gurus out there that say that's not the case, but you know what,
they probably can't justify their recommendation, they probably will just say, oh it's much faster
for me to type than Mr. Wright, well I'm telling you, it's much faster for you to learn by not
typing, than it is to type and get notes done without having actually learned anything, and not
only is there research on this, but you ask any of the students in our community, they will know
what we're talking about, because they will have felt the difference that it makes when you
haven't picked it. Freehand note taking strategy.

And on that note, we move on to point number three, is try to represent some ideas or
relationships between ideas with arrows and spatial arrangement. So the thing is that you can
actually represent a lot of information without having to write it. So I want you to imagine
something like this, A leads to B, and then B leads to C and D. So we have A and B leading to C
and D.

If we were to represent that in a mind map or a flow chart, or using arrows and spatial
arrangement, we would say, okay A is a pretty big topic, I'm gonna put it right here, B is a pretty
big topic, I'm gonna put it right here, C is a little mini piece, I can put it right in the middle, and I
can put D directly underneath it. And when you look at the page, you're gonna see A, B, little C,
and then D. And you'll see the flow of information going down the page.

That actually gives you a lot of information, and it uses a different part of your brain, which is
involved in spatial arrangement of things. This is why sometimes you can remember where on
your notes information is, but you don't actually remember what it is in itself. Or you remember
generally the position of items in your room or something, but you don't actually remember
exactly where it is.

Your brain's ability to process information in space, on the page, position of things on the page,
actually provides it with a lot more cues, that allows you to record that information much more
easily, and increases your retention. Now when we add arrows into the mix, it makes it even
easier, because let's say the relationship between A to B and C to D, in words, we would have to
say, A is a process that allows B to occur, which leads to C, and once C is occurred, D is able to
occur.

That's quite a long list of things, and when you write it, the only way that you can really process
that information is to read it from start to finish. You can't really look at entire paragraph and just
instantaneously take that information in. Visual processing is tens of thousands of times faster
than your ability to process written words. So if you have A arrow, B arrow, C plus D, that
communicates the relationship almost exactly the same way, and you're not really losing any
details there, nothing that was actually really meaningful at all, but your ability to take that in,
and also to revise it as much faster, because when you look at your notes, you will be able to
process, take that information in, and work with it literally tens of thousands of times faster than
if you were to read things.

This is actually something that we already know. For example, if you've ever read Lord of the
Rings, they dare not to spend like an entire page describing a single door. When you watch Lord
of the Rings in a movie, you just see the door, and you think that's quite a fancy door, and you
know about the door and the character, The picture speaks a thousand words. Actually, the
picture speaks like 10,000 words.

And if you're writing 10,000 words with something that can be represented with arrows and
spatial arrangement to form kind of a picture type understanding, you are going to be able to
study that much faster. And again, this is something that students often find very difficult when
they enter into university, because they're so used to writing everything out. So it's a good thing
to start breaking away from this early on. It's very easy to do, take it to a level that you're
comfortable with.

I'm not saying replace everything that you're writing with these crazy diagrams or anything like
that. What I'm saying is that when you see there's a certain relationship, instead of writing it as a
paragraph or a list, you think, can I express this through some arrows or a mini-mime map? Is
there another way that I can represent this information? It will make it a bit visually clearer for
me to see and make kind of a bit of a story or a flow or an image out of it. Always think about
that and start getting used to it.

And earlier you practice this, easier will be to transition into some of the high power, high
efficiency techniques that we're going BEAT later on. So, so far we've got pre-study, we've got
the idea of active learning through paraphrasing, and also now not only just paraphrasing, but
introducing the idea of this visual element, arrows, and spatial arrangement as well. Now again,
you don't have to be perfect at this. What I want you to do is give it a go. I want you to
experiment with it. I want you to try, feel it out. Don't worry if you feel like it's not giving you
the perfect result.
The most important thing is that you give it a go, you see how you find it, and if there's
something that you think you can do to improve, give that a go as well. You're not going to fail.
__

In-class guidelines

Maximise learning and reduce overwhelm from classes, lectures and

workshops by following these guidelines.

1. Always prestudy. Prestudy improves your retention, engagement and

enjoyment in class.

2. Focus your prestudy on the big-picture concepts, not details.

3. Always paraphrase and process information before writing notes.

4. Don't avoid feeling challenged. Good learning feels uncomfortable

because your brain is actively working.

5. Write non-linear notes. Mindmaps and spatial representations are much

more effective than linear notes.

6. Limit your word-count. The more you write, the less you're processing.
Learning happens in the brain.

Guide to prestudying correctly

Encoding
Back to Learning Support

What is the purpose of prestudy?

Prestudy is an important part of a studying system because it primes the brain
for deeper learning. Much of the difficulty with processing information is that
the rate and density of information we need to process during lectures,
classes or even meetings can be "too much, too fast", and sometimes "too
much, too fast and too complicated".

Prestudying can reduce this load when done correctly.

Effective prestudying helps give new information a place to fit.

Prestudying spreads the load

Instead of trying to figure out everything for the first time during an intensive
main learning event such as a class, lecture, workshop, or long study session,
prestudying addresses the big-picture questions in advance.

This frees up cognitive resources so that your brain can focus on making
sense of the more detailed information later.

The overload during the initial learning event is difficult to recover from.
When we enter an intensive learning event without priming our brain, it easily
enters cognitive overload. This makes information easier to forget, and
knowledge is slower to build. In effect, we are fighting an uphill battle.

When these events occur on a daily or weekly basis, it is challenging to

recover from this consequence. In many cases, it is so challenging that we
compromise on the knowledge that we can build by taking shortcuts or
sacrificing our performance.

For the learner, it feels more overwhelming with every class or lecture.
Our brain can focus on fewer things per session with good prestudying.
On the other hand, with effective prestudying, we spread the confusion
and cognitive load across multiple sessions.

We focus on building a big-picture understanding of the relevance first, then

learning about greater details. Over time, we become less confused and it is
easier to understand new information as our foundation is stronger.
Knowledge is faster and easier to build.

You've prestudied correctly if...

 You have a clear big-picture understanding of the topic

 You have covered the entire topic or sub-topic, not just one class or
lecture
 You do not have any details or facts memorised yet (i.e. you were
exclusively focused on the big picture)
 You see how the major ideas of the topic relate to each other and could
be grouped together
 You have some hypotheses around how the concepts might relate to
each other
 You feel ready to learn more detail

How much should you prestudy?

It's best to prestudy as much as you can before classes or lectures if you're in
a formal curriculum. This is because assessments are timed to the end of
these classes, so studying ahead gives you more time for revision.

High quality and comprehensive prestudy is one of the first steps that is
necessary to truly break away from the study grind.

However, simply covering content is not sufficient because you are unlikely to
have the retention, nuance and level of mastery required. Furthermore, most
learners lack the efficiency of study skills to actually study comprehensively at
a pace faster than lectures and classes. In fact, it's usually the opposite in that
class or lecture pace is too fast and they gradually fall behind!

Correct prestudying
Correct prestudying technique involves framing the learning and creating
organisational structure. This should always be one of the first steps involved
in learning.

Even if prestudy is done so comprehensively that lectures or classes become

unnecessary, the first stage of the study session should still be a framing and
organising step.

If there isn't enough time to prestudy comprehensively, then doing only this
step is still incredibly beneficial for overall efficiency.

Correct framing involves...

 Avoiding smaller details

 Identifying the main ideas or groups of ideas
 Identifying the key relationships between these ideas and groups of
ideas
 Gaining a big-picture understanding of the topic

Most learners do not realise what the intention of prestudy is and have
insecurity about not learning smaller details during prestudy. However,
committing to details in the early stages of studying activates isolated, lower-
order learning processes that waste time and make content much more
difficult to understand.

Tip
The main ideas and relationships identified in this step should be represented
in some form of notetaking if viable. If this is not possible, the mental exercise
of correct priming and framing during prestudy is still beneficial.

If writing notes, relational and non-linear notetaking is best, such as

mindmaps, because it allows the expression of complex relationships very
easily to a level of accuracy that is almost impossible with linear notetaking.

When to prestudy
This is the easiest to answer.

You can prestudy at any time before the main learning event. This entirely
depends on your time availability. A common strategy is to prestudy for the
upcoming week in the prior weekend, but many students will also prestudy for
the day in the morning of.

For high school students with moderately efficient techniques, you should be
able to prestudy at least 4 to 6 weeks of content in a single weekend, allowing
you to completely move beyond the class pace and completely escape the
exam study grind.

If you don't have any time, even a 10-minute skim before the class is
beneficial, as long as the above principles are still followed.