especially if you're behind, Jump Ahead!

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You could watch a documentary on advanced physics and get a lot out of it, even if you never took college physics, or even high school physics for that matter.

Many times when you start to understand a topic, you kind of arc across it. You see the three main things, or the four main things, or the two main things, and you start to put it together. You become an active learner. And even if you later turn out to be mistaken, at least you have a theory you can start to ask questions about.

I'm posting this because so many times in high school and college, I was dogged by the belief that there was only one right way to do it and that was the slow and thorough way. Not necessarily the case! We can learn in a variety of styles. We can both play to strength and experiment with adding new strengths.

In addition, when you jump ahead, you can start getting benefit out of the very next lecture. You don't need to wait a week to get "caught up." 20 minutes will do--sometimes less!

Have fun, experiment, learn a lot, learn in different ways (or with one primary style, both are perfectly valid).

awesome! i love learning random new things!

More free-form than random. For example, you're going to eventually get to the chapter in your geology text on earthquakes, right? No harm in ever so casually leafing through it now.

And you might get more out of it than you think.

You're giving yourself more choice. And hopefully, studying can be funner.

I always flipped through my high school and college textbooks at the beginning of the class term, to get a sense of what I was in for. I also did this with my sister's textbooks (she was 4-5 years/grades ahead of me) and it helped me initiate an interest in things that I would eventually learn a lot more about later on, e.g. chemistry.

Oh I'd read ahead if it was interesting. Heck during lunch (the eating part anyway, when I was done eating I'd go out and play), I'd read encyclopedias or some of the stories in the reader.