“Repetition is the mother of learning, the father of action, which makes it the architect of accomplishment.”
Zig Ziglar
Right from the time we started to go to the kindergarten, emphasis has always been on giving the answers to questions during our examinations. In the process to gather more positive feedback (read as marks) from the teacher as well as our parents, we resort to a method of repeating what was taught to us. Unfortunately, while repeating, the human mind got trained to do it verbatim and not as it is understood. The second kind of students could rightly summarise in my their words, what was meant to be communicated. I belonged to the latter category always.
In the process of memorising things, we forget to imbibe the main intention of a Law or a Theorem or a rule, and instead embed them as mere combination of words. Up until today, for me Newton’s third law is about the reaction being equal to the action but always opposite in direction. However, some might like to put it down as follows: “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.”. Both the explanations/citations are perfectly right, and acceptable. The same goes for Pythogoras’ Theorem about Right angled triangles. For me, you must square length of all three sides, and sum the length of the two sides forming the right-angle to get the square of the length of the hypotenuse. However, verbatim: “The square of the length of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of squares of the lengths of other two sides of the right-angled triangle.” Again, neither is wrong.
Learning has several rules, some of them are Golden rules to enable effective learning:
- Never memorise – Always try to understand the purpose of a theorem or law, and relate to something that you can understand under all situations. Try to associate with things you most vividly associate yourself with – concepts you are already familiar with. For example, you could imagine the footballer kicking a ball for Newton’s third law; the ball is in rest because the forces are in equilibrium. When the footballer exerts a force on the ball, as a reaction, the ball moves forward. As a continuation, the law of conservation of energy states that energy gets converted from one form to another; the footballer’s energy is exerted by the foot on the ball, and the ball moves forward as energy gets transferred.
- Learn by practice – Reading creates quite good imagining powers and can stay vivid in our minds for some time. However, when you put the same into action, and execute it physically, then there is a much higher chance of it to remain in your heads forever.
- Failure is good – When learning, failure is part of the game. When you fail in an attempt to understand a concept, never give up. Always stand back up, look back at what went wrong, and at what needs to be corrected. When you identify the course correction, and implement the measures needed, you become much better. And you know what?? When you learn from failures, you are bound to never ever forget the success. So, never fear failure, Failure is good for the system 😎
- Share by teaching – By sharing your knowledge, you increase the idea to get embossed and embedded in your brains in a much better manner, and will stay there for much longer than it would have if you kept it for yourself. Also, what it gives you as an opportunity is to understand someone else’s idea to deconstruct the concept into a much easier block to understand.
Now, some of you might come back asking what do you do in the case of a formula 😄😎. ‘Good One.’ In case of a formula or equation, there are always underlying rules or laws that form the basis of a formula. When you start by understanding the basis for these, you can remember any formula at any time without actually memorising them. For example, Unit for Force is Newton; the other way of expressing Newton is kg.m.s-2;deconstructing it, kg is the mass, and m.s-2 is unit of acceleration; further, acceleration is the rate of change of velocity, and velocity is rate of change of distance per unit time; => velocity is distance covered / time to cover distance; unit for distance is meter and unit for time is second. So Force = Mass x Acceleration. Similar logic can be applied to other complex formulae and units to deconstruct the term. It might look complicated at first, but it works every single time, including when you get stuck not knowing how to proceed further.
Memorising without trying to understand the concept could also get you into trouble. Not by making you do something wrong, but when you are probably in a spot, you could not be sure how to get yourself out of the hole. For sure, such situations arise every day in school and university during examinations, and could be arising at work. Nobody can remember 100% of things they memorise or study in school. But, one can definitely recollect small concepts that are the building blocks of the bigger building we are trying to identify.
Over time, the human mind comes across millions of concepts, and billions of incidents. As with project management, every big outcome is a agglomeration of small incidents that seem to have independently no relation with another, but have definitely an infinitesimally small connection to an outcome. Memorising will get you somewhere, whereas Understanding can get you anywhere.
And on that note,
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