Return of the Summer Classes

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School in the Past

During my early schooling years I always found myself daydreaming in class and hardly paying attention. Unsurprisingly I didn't always do as well as I could have in school. I found lectures to be increasingly more boring as I got older and as school went on. Sitting still in class and listening to someone lecture was not engaging for me and it was hard to learn. I still had the drive to try to do well, but it took a lot of personal effort to do so. I would spent many hours reading and watching videos outside of class until I would finally learn the information.

This would happen all throughout elementary school, high school, and college. During these long boring lectures I would fall asleep, and information would go in one ear and out the other. Obviously there was some sort of attention deficit that I was never diagnosed with, maybe ADD or something. Furthermore in school we were also taught to learn by rote memory. A long list of words would be given, and the students were told to repeat them over and over again until it stuck. I never found this engaging at all and I hated doing it, and even worse after using the information it would just seem to disappear shortly after.

Discovering how to learn

The dullness and pain stake of rote memory and boring lectures would be a problem I would deal with for a long time. By some stroke of luck, over the last semester I was given a lot of time to pursue some personal interests. I'm very interested in how our brains work and so I took a little bit of time to read some articles and books on the subject. This eventually led me to the subject of memory and how humans actually learn. This became extremely interesting to me because I had never heard of the techniques I found before, and I never hear anyone talking about it or teaching the methods.

For the last part of my Spring semester this year I decided to learn these methods and relearn how to learn. This involved a lot of exercises and experimentation with different techniques. I started to see progress, and I am still training and practicing these techniques today. One of the most important ideals that I discovered is that we are visual learners over everything else. If we want to learn abstract information easily, the ideas need to be translated into visual ideas that our brains evolved to learn and remember.

This drive for self education became one of the most important ideals that I developed over the last six months. Six months doesn't sound like a lot of time, but I made tremendous progress over these months and anyone can do the same thing. My goal was to see how these skills would affect my performance in school over the summer classes. I am currently in an engineering program at University, so I was curious to see how I could apply these skills to my school work.

Returning to Class

This past week I started my summer classes at university. I was expecting to be bored in lecture like usual, and I was prepared to read the book and find a bunch of videos after classes on the subjects covered. But when the lecturer started talking in class, instead of getting distracted by occipital information around the room, something different happened. In place of just listening to the words the professor was saying, I trained my brain to turn those into visual images and create a vivid animation out of them. This made it extremely easy for me to pay attention and actually learn the information being discussed in class. I'm really excited to share this development with you guys as I had always hated school and the roteness of it.

It was now much easier for me to retain the new information and perform increasingly well on the given quizzes. These techniques and visualizations made it easy to interconnect ideas and see the bigger picture. Persons with attention deficit disorders are too readily handed prescriptions to solve their problems and I almost did the same this summer. Instead of giving a band-aid fix to our problems, we should try to utilize these gifts and our need for visual information for our brains to process.

I hope you guys were able to learn something interesting from this post, as I look forward to sharing more of this information with you guys in the future. My website offers additional posts and products related to learning, cryptocurrencies, and financial independence if you are interested in checking it out! Any comments, resteems, and up votes are deeply appreciated.

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