narcasse: Pitt the Younger. Amazing Grace. (momentum)
[personal profile] narcasse
In the midst of the process of reordering my priorities, catching up on various rl business, and spending even less time at home than before, thankfully, this weekend after one pre-planned social event, in opposed to all the other ones that weren't, I've actually had a chance to sit down and consider some of the details. One of the matters that I've been considering recently is further studies, not in the sense of attending any particular course or similar but rather in the form of studying myself, with the aim of eventually sitting the associated exams. I'd considered this particular field of study before but due to a variety of circumstances I'd never quite made it that far long, and certainly not far enough to start considering a potential final outcome. And in coming back to the idea, one issue that I've been coming up against is the methodology.

My study method in the past has been a rather slow one. I've preferred to learn by way of understanding just how any single piece of information fits into the whole, and while this is a very good way of grasping the overview, it doesn't, unfortunately, lend itself to rapid learning. It takes time to realise how any single piece of data informs upon and integrates with the greater whole, and attempting to learn anything like that means that vast quantities of time are spent comprehending all facets of a single item. This is perhaps, in many ways, quite a philosophical approach to learning and certainly has its place when it comes to existential concepts, but it doesn't work so well when it comes to basic mechanics. By way of example, using this method I could spend hours, if not days, ruminating on the 'how' and 'why' of Hester Stanhope's death in Lebanon, none of which would change the fact that that was where she died. Like mathematics, if a single answer is required then the extraneous detail that goes with it just takes time that could be better utilised.

That's not to say that the details that lead into a single answer can be dismissed absolutely, but rather that they can be allowed to fall into place later. A framework of literal data is required first, before all the points can be linked up so by trying to link the points as I go along, I've in fact made things a lot more difficult than they could have been on occasion. This method of learning also explains why I've been having so much trouble getting started on the subject area I've been toying with for some time. I've very much had an all or nothing approach. On one hand, because my method of learning has required that everything link up coherently it's led to the tedium of trying to figure it all out before I've had the gist of the basic terminology required, and, on the other, it's meant that when I've found that I don't have enough of an overview to start tying points together, I, instead of trying to fill in the blanks, go right back to the start and work through it as if I'm learning everything from the ground up. That first issue having led to a great deal of frustration compounded by the disheartening knowledge that I didn't know nearly enough, while the second meant that I was going over things I already knew and thus got bored rehashing the same thing over and over again.

This learning method thus hasn't served my purpose at all. In fact it's done little more than frustrate my studies and feed into the double-edged sword of not knowing enough, being aware of it and then believing that I'll never accumulate enough knowledge. Knowing what you don't know is the corner stone of autodidacticism but that knowledge needs to then inform directed study rather than simply be a stalling point. I know what I don't know, and that's an awful lot of things, but I've also let myself get overwhelmed by that. In many ways I've set my lack of knowledge up as an insurmountable obstacle that has both terrified me and at the same time allowed me to wallow in ignorance. By allowing such obstacles to take on a life of their own, fuelled by my own fears and imaginings, I've give them far more significance that they're really due, and because I've created these overwhelming obstacles in my mind I've also allowed myself to fail to surmount them. In short, to reference Ani DiFranco's Swing, I've been the voice in my own head that says “You suck” and I've been saying it repeatedly.

The route to overcoming this, as a first step, has been recognising it and identifying the details of the various issues that make up the whole, which is something I've been building up to over the last week. After that the next part was a relatively simplistic analysis of each situation, culminating in the formulation of a viable solution. And having managed that identification, deconstruction and proposing of a solution, the only thing I'm left to do is to organise my workload, deploy a sensible time-management plan and, deal with a few left over tasks that I'd simply like to clear out of the way before I really begin. Granted, I could say that it's a shame that it's taken me this long to realise this solution but I very much doubt that I would have wholly grasped it before, or been in any state to actually implement it if I did. Thus, inevitably I've reached this revelation at the right time, in the right place, with the right resources, to actually be able to reap it's benefit. After all, that capacity for implementation is the real differentiator between knowledge and action, turning academic understanding into genuinely pragmatic solutions.
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narcasse: Sebastian Flyte.  Brideshead Revisited (2008) (Default)
Narsus

June 2017

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