Dear Gabe,
I know you have always been a great student, but now that you will be a college student next year, I have a bit of advice on how to perform to your ridiculously high potential. What's even more is that this advice will not only help your performance, but it can help you to better learn the material your being presented and retain it in your memory over a long period of time.
The first thing I would recommend you do is to establish a schedule on your calendar (whether that is physical calendar or a phone/computer app does not matter) in which you organize your time. Be sure to schedule time into each day for completing assignments and also time for reviewing material learned earlier in the semester (more on that later). Be faithful to stick to your schedule as the hours of a day can disappear so easily disappear with you even noticing it! Do build in time for recreation each day, and avoid trying to study for huge blocks of time. Provide some opportunities for breaks and naps.
Speaking of naps: Don't feel bad if you get sleepy when studying! Sometimes it is okay to power through assignments you need to finish, but taking naps can actually allow your brain the opportunity to consolidate memories of information recently learned. So don't shy away from putting your head down and napping for 15-30 minutes when you need a break!
While you are learning new information, I recommend that you think of ways to connect the newly learned information with prior knowledge that you already possess--this is called elaboration, and it is a very effective method of learning and retaining information. One way that you could engage in elaboration would be make analogies to other concepts that are similar to the newly learned material. Use these analogies only so long as they are useful. You will likely find that analogies are a wonderful way to grasp a new concept, but the more you learn about the new concept, you will eventually have to discard the analogy when it no longer offers a meaningful or accurate representation of your growing understanding of the new material. That is okay! Use analogies only so long as they are useful. Furthermore, you can reflect on why the analogy was useful at first and why it no longer is as a means of clarifying your learning. Reflecting on what you learn is a form of metacognition, another thing that can strengthen your learning.
Metacognition is basically just thinking about your own thinking. By being reflective and aware of your own thought processes, you can often identify areas of your knowledge that are incomplete or inaccurate. By being intentional in thinking through what you are learning and identifying areas of conflict between what you used to believe (or were taught) and new information, you become a better learner. Furthermore, by identifying these areas of conflict and finding a way to resolve these conflicts will strengthen your memory of the material over the long-term. Another kind of metacognition is to take note of what you do and don't know when testing yourself.
As it turns out, testing yourself is one of the strongest and most reliable ways to improve your memory of information. It is called retrieval practice, and we have actually had empirical evidence to support this learning method for over a hundred years! When you are learning new information, quiz yourself about main points and important terms following sections and chapters. Many textbooks have quizzes built into chapter reviews, but even if they don't, you can create your own questions using the Cornell notetaking method or just create flashcards. Quiz yourself within a day of first learning the information, then quiz yourself again a few days later. As you become more familiar with the information and can answer the questions accurately, delay a week between quiz sessions, and continue to do so while extending the time period between quiz periods. This will greatly improve and deepen the memory trace for the information.
This brings us the the last and most reliable of all learning strategies: spacing. Just like I suggested above, by spreading out the testing over ever-increasing periods of time, memory for that material will be better learned and more available to retrieve. This is not only true for testing oneself (but testing is the ideal method), but for all sorts of learning. By practicing something, it is best to spread that practice out over time. It feels like you are learning something if you just keep at it during blocks of time, but you will actually see greater learning in the long-term if you spread out that learning/practice.
Hope this helps, Gabe! Good luck, buddy!
Uncle Matt
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