I don’t read textbooks. I have them, and I refer to them, I carry around more than most, but I definitely don’t sit down and read a chapter from the first page to the last page. I noticed during the first weeks of this semester: I didn’t read books on the job in the Navy, I just had tons of them and read the sentences, pages, or paragraphs that I really needed to solve whatever problem faced me at the moment, which was usually oriented around producing something, a security plan, a casualty report, something that told somebody else what I needed to know. Now I’m producing things for myself, things I use the week before the test. A port plan, a maintenance schedule, was always written for somebody senior to me, who’d know quite a bit about what I was trying to convey. Similarly, as we progress through blocks of material, we become more informed. That’s the person I produce the flashcards for: me in a couple of weeks. The flashcards should at a minimum address all the learning objectives in the notes and anything I didn’t pick up in class (I usually write cards in class also. I get either the whole question and answer, or just the question, or just the answer. This is fine for me. That’s what the end of the day review time is for. Flashcards also minimize the barrier to repitition. In fact, they make repitition the norm. You have to shuffle through the cards looking for one, you’re constantly reorganizing them, looking at them. That seems to me to be only a good thing. They don’t travel perfectly well, not as well as 8.5″x11″, but nothing’s perfect. Sometimes I forget flashcards and just have paper, in which case I write as though I was writing flashcards and then I rewrite the notes as flashcards once I have some blank ones in hand. Production and repitition. Not enough time to read about this stuff and producee and repeat. The textbooks are just there to provide answers for flashcards that I can’t otherwise complete.