Author: Eric MacKnight

I have been teaching English since 1980 in the United States, Morocco, Switzerland, Austria, Canada, The Netherlands, and China. Good Habits, Good Students is my first book.

Social Bookmarks

When you bookmark a web page, you save its location for yourself. When you ‘social bookmark’ a web page, you save its location for yourself and, if you wish, everyone else. Social bookmarks are saved on sites like Digg, Technorati, del.icio.us, and Rojo. People who view such sites can then check the pages you’ve bookmarked, and you can see the ones they’ve bookmarked. Result? The best—or the goofiest—pages on the internet are seen by more people. Continue reading “Social Bookmarks”

Drink lots of water (book excerpt)

The brain—and the rest of the body—needs plenty of water to work at its peak levels.

Recent research by scientists studying the brain tells us what our grandmothers have always known: the body needs plenty of water to stay in good working order. When you study at home, have a pitcher of water at hand. At school, ask permission to have a bottle of water at your desk. The rule of thumb is that we should drink 6–8 glasses a day (about 48–64 oz., or somewhere between 1.5 and 2 litres).

Soda pop is not an approved substitutes for water. The sugar content in these drinks puts you on a roller-coaster of sugar highs and lows, and it does nothing to help your body—including your brain—work better. Fruit juice? Energy drinks? No. Stick with water.

Eat properly, get enough sleep, and stay drug-free (book excerpt)

Your brain—have I mentioned this already?—is part of your body.

You can’t expect your brain to do its best unless you take care of it. Junk food, irregular meals, inadequate sleep, cigarettes, alcohol, caffeine, “recreational” drugs—all of these diminish your brain’s ability to work. All of them, too, are entirely avoidable—bad habits people slip into because they take the easy way, the lazy way. Be smarter than that.

And if you’ve already developed, or begun to develop, a bad habit in this area, break it now!

Skipping breakfast is a common error in today’s society. I’ve made this the topic of my sample goal. If you aren’t sure what a “proper breakfast” is, now is a great time to learn a bit about nutrition. Your parents and teachers may be able to help you with this (see Chapter 4: Getting Help from Parents and Teachers).

How to Define a Goal (book excerpt)

A poorly defined goal will be pretty useless. Look at this one:

“My goal is to improve my marks in English.”

This is a nice idea, but it’s not a well-defined goal, because it leaves many important questions unanswered. For example, how much improvement is desired? How will the improvement be measured? Over what period of time is the goal to be achieved? What action is required to achieve the goal? How will progress toward the goal be recorded and judged?

A well-defined goal answers these questions right from the beginning. Continue reading “How to Define a Goal (book excerpt)”

William James on Habits

William James (1842-1910) was a member of the illustrious New England family that included his brother, the novelist Henry James. One of the most important American philosophers, he is known as the originator of Pragmatism. In 1890 he published a book entitled The Principles of Psychology, which is still regarded, over 100 years later, as an excellent description of how our brains work. Chapter IV, “Habit”, includes these passages:

. . . In most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.

. . . Provided one can stand it, a sharp period of suffering, and then a free time, is the best thing to aim at, whether in giving up a habit like that of opium, or in simply changing one’s hours of rising or of work. It is surprising how soon a desire will die…if it be never fed.

. . . If we often flinch from making an effort, before we know it the effort-making capacity will be gone; and . . . if we [allow] the wandering of our attention, presently it will wander all the time. Continue reading “William James on Habits”

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