When I look over the posts in this blog, I see patterns. These are the ideas that excite me.
If you’re like me, you only learn when you’re enthusiastically interested. Without enthusiasm, I’ll be sleepy and unfocused in no time. I’ll do a half-assed job.
When I learn what excites me, I learn how I learn. This is Meta Learning.
It’s useful to learn how I learn because my style of learning is unique, as is yours. We don’t necessarily learn the way teachers teach.
In grade school I wasn’t learning to read as quickly as the other kids. Was that because of my developmental pace? Or the way reading was being taught? Some other factor? It would have been easy to conclude that I would never be a strong reader or writer (screw that!).
Let’s not to assume that teachers know how to teach us. If we find a teacher that resonates with us, that’s fantastic. Hold on to that teacher! In general though, it can be dangerous to follow a developmental checklist laid out by someone else.
We are responsible for our own learning.
With the explosion of the internet, there is so much information at our fingertips. How do we choose what to absorb? How do we absorb it?
It starts with learning how we learn. For me, Meta Learning is about paying attention to what excites me, then cracking the patterns of enthusiasm.
In high school, I realized that sitting through math lectures was pointless. When somebody else works through a math problem on the board, I get bored. No learning happens, no matter how hard I try. When I looked at the examples in the math book and then attempted to do the problems myself, it was engaging. I toggled back and forth between actively attempting the problems and passively reading about it, like this.
- Skim.
- Flip the pages.
- Work problem til stumped.
- Flip the pages.
- Repeat.
This approach kept me awake, and I solved the problems. Up until the age of fifteen or sixteen, I had inherently assumed that teachers knew how to teach us all. They didn’t. Nowadays, I’m wary of deferring my learning approach to others.
Meta Learning may be the most valuable skill to learn.
Do you know how you learn? If you don’t, start by asking, “What excites me?” then go from there.
published .
Next Post : Beyond the Sky
Prev Post : Ideas Man
All Posts