Thursday, February 25, 2010

Where do you learn?

Since gaining actual friends at college (I know, I know), I've been repeatedly surprised by how often people skip lecture. I must have noticed this earlier -- after all, I did observe that lecture halls tended to get less full as the semester went on -- but somehow I thought that all good students always went to lecture or some such. Apparently this is not the case.

Also, it seems like people are supposed to know by this time whether they're "visual learners" or "audio learners" or some such. I have never been able to figure this out. But apparently I learn pretty well by going to lectures (as opposed to doing the reading), although this is probably a motivation problem rather than anything else.

For 2.5 years this strategy served me well, but now that I run into courses with mediocre-to-poor lecturers who are always unclear and often omit large quantities of important material, it's becoming problematic.

1 comment:

  1. I seem to be largely a kinesthetic learner, at least for the kind of things I learn from my MIT classes, so I find I'm usually better off punting lecture and working on the labs/homework. I don't particularly recommend this as a way to learn, because it's slow as hell, but it seems to work for me.

    I wonder how well it would work to read the readings to yourself out loud. I'm an auditory learner more than I'm a visual learner, at least for things that are primarily language-centered, so when I need to learn something like a character sheet for a game or a part for a play or something I'm going to be giving a talk on, I'll read it out loud to myself, and that seems to work a lot better than reading it without vocalizing.

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