School: How to make it easier?

You can't. To make LIFE easier, don't go to school. What we need to do is bring back the concept of apprenticeship, to work under another person and learn the ways without having to learn a bunch of bulls*it that is otherwise pretty pointless.

Let me elaborate: I go to my lab and I learn a concept such as enzyme kinetics. "What the hell is this for?", I ask myself. Without a clear context of what I'm learning what is the point? If I can't put it into real world practice what is the point? The teacher may mention the idea behind it, but it takes time to understand the point. Real world connections MUST be continually be made in order for anyone to understand.

I have evidence: I spent two summers working in a lab and learned more techniques about how to use a spectrophotometer than I would have ever in any of my classes. Gradually, I understood the concept because I was actually applying it to a real world area of science.

You guys remember the 15 bottle mysterious chemical lab in general chemistry? That was pointless. I may have learned a thing or two about solubility, but you eventually learn that anyway when you apply those rules in most chemistry classes.

Furthermore, everything we learn is very inefficient. Of all the classes we have taken and all the information that was thrown to us, how much of it do we retain? How much history, how many terms or names do we actually retain? The education is very inefficient. The way I see things, the education feeds you information in blocks. Whether you actually catch that information and retain it is up to you. Often, it's too much to take it all in.

My solution: Learn at your own pace and learn everything well. You might say that this will take forever to get anywhere, but if you cut out all of the time that you spent studying for stuff that you end up forgetting and simply worked on things that mattered the things you learn would a lot more sense. To better understand what I'm saying, take for instance a puzzle. If you worked on multiple parts of the puzzle at once, you end up with blotches of empty spaces. You lose the connectedness of the image. You may have a general sense of the image, but there's still things missing. If, however, you were to work only on one corner of the puzzle and fill it into completion, you get a cleaner product, even if you don't see the whole picture.

In life, we aim for a goal such as becoming a doctor, which is analogous to the complete image of the puzzle. However, there are multiple pathways to get there, which is analogous to the way we approach the puzzle. Working from one part of the puzzle, filling all the gaps and fully grasping just that corner will enable us to remember how that part of the image looks like even if we don't get the whole picture. Adding pieces wherever to simply get a sense of what the image looks like, will give us only a slight idea of what the full image looks like.

My point here is that becoming an expert in one area will help progress much faster than trying to be a jack of all trades. In the case of school, we try to jump from too many topics, never really concentrating and making connections to the next topic and that's the downfall of the education system. Overtime, we lose the image simply because it was too vague.

My rant has gone on long enough. I will propose my complete solution in the next blog.

CHEERs ^_^

Tip O' the day

Don't be a biochem major.

Cheers

Citric MOfreaking Acid Cycle

In a haste to get down some annoying biochemistry, in which I'm doing absolutely horrible, I have come across this video, which may or may not help you make your life easier. It sure as hell has made my life easier. This video not only explains the citric acid cycle, it also shows the mechanisms with some swooshing special effects.

If only we could just have Youtube be my teacher... at least there you can shut up annoying teachers using the pause button.



Cheers..