The Training Hollow

For math problems, sometimes the most important thing for getting done faster is practice. If you’re very familiar with the steps to solving a problem, you can quickly break a problem down into the smaller steps you need to solve it, which can be important so you don’t freeze up when you encounter a hard problem. If there are multiple ways to solve a problem, find the one that seems simplest and most memorable to you even if it isn’t necessarily the most efficient, because it will come to you more naturally on a test and you won’t have to spend time trying to remember how to do something or questioning if you did it right.

For poems, I think the best thing to do is to practice annotating poems as you read them. If a question mentions certain literary techniques to analyze in the poem, search for and underline anything related to them as you read, and write down any ideas you have about what they mean and why the author might have used those techniques. Otherwise, there are a lot of things you can look at when deciding what to analyze; some poems are more ambiguous than others about their meaning, but in general assume that everything in the poems you are asked to analyze has some kind of hidden meaning. Look for any recurring words, phrases, comparisons, or ideas throughout the poem, and try to connect them to each other and what the author might have meant by using them. It helps to read and annotate the poem slowly, line by line, writing down anything the poem makes you feel or think of as you read it. If you are given the name of the author and date published, you can use that too, especially if you know something about the author or time period and how that might have influenced the meaning of the poem.

I hope this helps!