When facing to some new material in mathematics, I feel easily to be overwhelmed by lots of details with losing the woods for the trees. So is there some good strategy to study the materials particularly for the first few times(e.g. reading textbook) ?
e.g. is it generally recommended to mentally review when finish reading each chapter, or even section in a textbook, by summarizing the ideas with blank papers and pens, for example ? What I am doing so far is to just continue after reading each section, but it seems easily get lost somewhere later, either convinced by logical steps but do not know what it is really doing, or even just forget the previous step/idea to understand the current staff.
It is quite strange that even though it is understood at least in some level for a certain knowledge when reading a textbook, but after some time, there are some 'knowledge points' are forgotten even the ideas