What is Learning and why is it difficult?
Learning can be defined in many ways, I think it is a process of acquiring new knowledge, understanding, skills, attitudes, and preferences which somehow changes our mind about something. This might look simple but it is in fact challenging for most of us, the reason is because we give more importance to the information we already agree with and less importance to the information we don’t agree with because of misconceptions that we have about world which combines with confirmation bias and this makes learning Gard and it gets very difficult to change someone’s perspective.
My best learning experience
I come across lot of mathematics being a computer science student, but I honestly din’t like math when I started with my degree and was not aware that I will have to dive deep into the core concepts of math. This disliking of math created a night mare, I was not able to concentrate whenever I start studying or doing homework. I struggled a lot with all the math courses until I talked to my dad about this problem that I was facing. He just told me few thing and magically from the next day I was able to concentrate more, it increased my interest and now, I am able to get more understanding when I study math. Wondering how it all happened?
Why I started enjoy it?
My dad did a very simple trick, he talked to me about how I can use my math knowledge in computer science projects and jobs. He told me all about Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, how all the Linear Algebra concept are used in making robots. I use to hate Linear Algebra as I was thinking what is the use of learning all these theories, but this totally changed my mind. After hearing all about how my existing knowledge can be used in real world and getting some motivation, it created a link in my mind which increased an interest in me to learn more math. My dad simply helped me connect the things I like and things I don’t like, this was really an eye opening experience for me. I learned that it’s all about interest and how you connect new information with the existing one, I started doing the same thing to all other subject that I thought is boring and it helped me a lot getting good grades.
Is it all about getting good grades?
The simple answer to this is no, because we don’t want to invest our valuable time learning something which is temporary and doesn’t retain till when we actually need to use that knowledge. I faced this problem as well, I really like to learn new programming languages and I love to code. I usually take lot of online courses to learn new programming languages, but I noticed one problem with my learning and that is I was not able to retain information for long time after I finished my course. Once I took this course of learning React Native and the instructor in the course suggested to code along with him when he teaches, instead of just watching what he is coding. This totally changed my way of learning, now I can really remember things that I learned for long time and I think this is because of repetative practise as he suggested never to copy & paste the code.
Conclusion
According to my learning journey, I think all three types of learning is equally important but it depends on situation. Also sometimes, combination of all three seems to work well for me.
