How I Learn

Bonjour à Tous!

This week was my last week of high school, and I am soon going to be diving into my exams that I start writing at the start of next week. Of course, I have had to be studying away, and upon my study's (more specifically for French) I discovered something about myself.

When I was looking over my tenses I found that I was memorizing everything, just as pretty much ever student taking French has done. I was memorizing just how to form the tense, that I didn't even know what it meant. Now, just think about how we have learned our maternal language... when you needed a word to express something, that is when you learned it, and until you needed it again, you would use it again, and perhaps learn it's other meanings. When we learned the word "go" we didn't have to think about changing it into another tense to "went" or "gone" or anything like that, so why do we learn another language like that?

Now, I know the easy answer to that, basically that we have a standardized curriculum that needs to be obeyed and it's only by measuring up to that curriculum that we can get the "all powerful and mighty marks" that determine a pass or fail. This leaves me and many other students memorizing everything like the digits in pi (which I actually know to 50).

This idea of memorizing things and not actually learning it by functionality and necessity. Let's face it. I have yet to encounter a day where I have needed to know how to calculate the area of a circle, or use the quadratic formula. Some things are just pointless in math. Don't get me wrong, I love math (it doesn't really love me) but just to be memorizing a ton a formulas that don't have any connections to us.

I don't know about other people, but I have a great short term memory, and when I memorize something, it sticks for as long as I need it to get me through (like a test or exam) then it's gone and I might as well have never learned it in the first place. But when I had to learn French (like the past summer), I had to actually learn things, and not just memorize. And that is stuck with me.

From my journey to yours,
Amber.

Photos from here and here.