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Know Thy Learning Style
Jan. 23rd, 2008 11:03 amI'm now in the 3rd week of my second semester as a distance education student, and I'm wrangling some pretty nit-picky readings (class powerpoint, articles and book chapters) full of details that I need to know. (It isn't cataloging for nothing, folks.)
Distance education is hard in some respects - there's a lot put on the student to keep up with things. YOU have to go to the CLASS as opposed to just showing up in a place and having things handed to you. You have to choose to learn, as opposed to choosing to fill out the assignments by rote.
Today's newsflash, in Moments of Duh, is that I learn stuff SO MUCH BETTER if I write it down. I wouldn't have said I was a kinesthetic learner, and I do a lot of reading and do okay retaining things. But the best way for me to learn stuff, especially complicated stuff, is to hear it out loud and write it down in great detail. After that I almost never look at my notes (though they can be useful for papers) - it's the writing it that makes it stick.
Since no aspect of these classes happens out loud, I haven't been taking notes. It felt a little silly to take notes from an article or a reading, when I could just go back to the article and look at it again if I needed to. But clearly, getting the stuff into my brain requires me taking notes, so I'm going to do it.
Also, typing notes onto a screen doesn't work. I think I need to buy myself a notebook. Old-skool!
Distance education is hard in some respects - there's a lot put on the student to keep up with things. YOU have to go to the CLASS as opposed to just showing up in a place and having things handed to you. You have to choose to learn, as opposed to choosing to fill out the assignments by rote.
Today's newsflash, in Moments of Duh, is that I learn stuff SO MUCH BETTER if I write it down. I wouldn't have said I was a kinesthetic learner, and I do a lot of reading and do okay retaining things. But the best way for me to learn stuff, especially complicated stuff, is to hear it out loud and write it down in great detail. After that I almost never look at my notes (though they can be useful for papers) - it's the writing it that makes it stick.
Since no aspect of these classes happens out loud, I haven't been taking notes. It felt a little silly to take notes from an article or a reading, when I could just go back to the article and look at it again if I needed to. But clearly, getting the stuff into my brain requires me taking notes, so I'm going to do it.
Also, typing notes onto a screen doesn't work. I think I need to buy myself a notebook. Old-skool!