This post discusses about temperament control issues during preparation for IIT entrance but it holds true at earlier level as well. So, consider this as something related to habit which affects different aspects of life. The single reason that contributes most in failure to qualify for IIT for good students is poor temperament management. Some of the situations described here may look familiar to you. You make too many unintentional errors. You are suggested to be careful. You prepare hard but forget important points at crucial moments. You know things well but are too slow in applying them; perhaps you are not sure whether you are applying right or not. You get hold on the issue and suddenly lose concentration. Mind becomes either blank or starts wandering. Sometimes you feel confident—JEE is well within your reach. Sometimes you feel just the opposite. Everyone else seems to have prepared better than you. You keep changing your strategy with every suggestion you rece...

  We drove our Car in rural Konkan area recently. Distance was about 160 miles. Roads were good and bad in patches. On good patches, we enjoyed driving at speed of 60 miles per hour. Whereas, on bad patches, it was difficult to go beyond 10 miles per hour. A general feeling was that we were at the slower speed for about 4 hours and at the higher speed for only 2 hours. Roads were bad; that was the conclusion. You can understand that about two-third of the travel time, we were struggling to get a speed of 10 miles per hour. Let us see another aspect of the journey by getting idea about length of the bad or good road. Since, we had 4 hours of drive at a speed of 10 miles per hour, the length of such roads was 10*4 = 40 miles. Similarly, length of the road travelled in 2 hours at 60 miles per hour can be computed as 60*2 = 120 miles. So, total distance travelled was 120+40 = 160 miles, out of which 120 miles were good and only 40 miles were rough. In terms of %, only (40/160)*100 ...

  Suppose you have already been taught the theory on certain topic or you have studied that from some sources. Now you are practicing to solve some problems. Imagine two scenarios. In the first one, you are taught a method to solve problems and few problems are practiced. You learn a method. Another method is taught to solve another type of problem and thus you learn another method. This way you solve many problems, and you also learn many methods of solving them. Now, if a question is given to you, you may try identifying a suitable method from all the methods that you have learnt to solve such questions and then apply that method to solve that. This is quite a common way of doing bad in Mathematics as one can select an unsuitable method to solve a question. In the second scenario, you get a problem and you yourself try to solve this. If you are able to solve this in one or two attempts, you learn something. But if you are not able to solve this so easily and keep trying that ...

  Mathematics is all about understanding concepts, practicing them on regular basis and relating them with real life incidences. As you practice various questions from your textbook or from any other resources, you come across questions with varied challenges. Your best friends are those problems which you are not able to solve easily.  If you solve a problem on your own in the first attempt, it’s good. It adds to your confidence and validates that whatever you know works in solving such problems. In the beginning you may need this. If you can solve all the problems without much difficulty, then you are just validating your knowledge. These problems are not helping you to expand your understanding of the concepts. You must look for other sources of questions because your brain is not getting challenged enough. A conceptual and non-tricky problem, which doesn’t get solved by you easily, helps you in many ways. As you try solving such problems in different ways, you deve...