Off to Lesson 1. Off to Lesson 1. To prove to dad that you’re not a fool. You’ve got your lunch packed up, your boots tied tight. We hope you don’t get in a fight!

Ah, good old lesson 1. The foundation of our course. Your first exposure to the LSAT or, at the very least, the Blueprint method. Either way, it’s an important class, and one from which you should hope to get the most.

Lesson 1 will introduce you to the Blueprint methods for Logical Reasoning. It’s an overview of what you’ll learn for those sections and provides a framework which will be filled in through the rest of the lessons.

It’s also your introduction to formal logic. While some will be familiar with the concepts, it’s formalizing something that most people feel they inherently know. I think you’ll be surprised by how little logic you actually can clearly communicate.

But we’ll help you with all of that, and you’ll be on your way to LSAT ninja-hood in no time. However, here are a few tips to help you get the most out of that first lesson.

1) Show up on time and ready to go. This is good advice generally, but you really don’t want to miss any of the first lesson. The building blocks are laid early, and you don’t want to miss out on an important concept.

2) Review the lesson an hour after you get home. Studies have shown that the surest way to learn a concept is to go over it once, review it an hour later, review it a day later, review it a week later, and review it a month later.* After getting home, look over the lesson so that the concepts begin to take hold in your long term memory.

3) Take advantage of the free video course for lesson 1! You can do your one day review by watching Matt and Trent make us look bad (they have professional animators and writers! it’s not fair!) in the first video lesson. And it’s a great one. Having these concepts explained to you by two different people will help your brain hold on to it a lot better.

4) Do the homework. All of it. Seriously, get in this habit. The first few lessons aren’t too bad; the later lessons, however, ramp up the homework significantly. If you don’t get in the habit of finishing it now, you’ll start to fall further and further behind. Since this test is probably in the top 5 list of importance, put the work in.

5) Show up for the homework review (half an hour before any regular class), even if you don’t have any questions. You may have nailed the homework, but listening to other people’s questions and your instructor’s answers will, again, help solidify the concepts. When a questions is asked, you should try to quickly explain the reasoning to yourself. This will show you that you do understand the concepts and, if you don’t and just made a lucky guess on the homework, show you what was really going on with the logic.

6) Don’t let any questions fester. You’ve been given access to a TA for a reason. If you can’t figure something out, send us an e-mail. The quicker you get an answer to something (and we’re pretty fast with responses), the easier it will be to incorporate it into your knowledge base. And the less likely it is to keep you up at night, tossing and turning with logic game nightmares (oh, they’ll come).

*My training teaches me I need a citation here. My laziness, however…