Studying: THE challenge
Weird title, innit?
Well, let me explain. As far as I can remember, I was never really big on studying. What it means is that for the most part of my curriculum, I pretty much did the minimum that was needed.
There were subjects in which I was good pretty much “by nature” and rather instinctively such as English and Math and others in which I clearly sucked like Geography and History. I was never big on learning about dates and past events. I’m sure this says something about me.
The point being that I I didn’t put a lot of efforts in school work unless I cared for the subject. Not to say I put a lot more effort when I did care, but anyway…
This behavior followed me to university where I started to learn more about the English language and its “surroundings” (e.g. literature, American civilization, history of England, pronunciation and the likes). Most of it, I would say, I actually found interesting. I had, after all, chosen this path for myself. But some of it irked me (hello linguistics, I’m thinking about you!). This led to some rare failed exams by the end of my 3-years stint because I was too bothered to… bother.
In other words, what I’m trying to say here is that even when I did study for exams, it usually was the day before and that was usually enough to at least grant me a mark that was good enough that I wouldn’t have to change my behavior.
The problem with this is that I never really learnt how to learn properly. If I did know how to do that, it’s long been forgotten. This is why today I find it challenging to study for something that I really care about. It happened before that I would order a book, “study” it and then consider that that was it. Problem with this mentality is that for the most part, at least where IT is concerned, just reading will not be good enough. Theory only brings you so far, you do have to force yourself to practice till you’re sure you’ve understood what you’ve read about. This is what I find the most challenging. But even if practice wasn’t needed, just reading is also not enough to really make things stick in your memory, and that’s an additional problem of mine.
I’m also lazy. That doesn’t help either. But now that I’m learning (or have been learning) about networking, I do see that I really do have to go out of my way to practice. The environment at work is good but not good enough on its own. I have to create labs at home and put the time and efforts into them. And forcing myself to do just that is not easy. Rewarding when I start understanding things, sure, but not easy. That’s why I sometimes think that following a proper education would help, because I would then feel forced to do exercises that I’m given and that it would in a way give me a “frame” to evolve in. But then again, getting a proper education also has strings attached: time and money.
Online courses (e.g. what Udemy offers) are, I feel, in the middle of a self-education (where you just go and find what you need when it’s required) and a “proper” education. By that I mean that you have a – usually self-proclaimed – teacher providing you with a more or less structured course for you to slowly learn the topic you’re working on. The problem here is that depending on the source, the course may be lacking and this could ultimately lead to frustration and to you looking for another course that you hope will be better. I’ve had this issue mainly with C++ and networking so far. To be fair, another problem with online courses is that as the teacher, you’re supposed to only be teaching something very specific. If the student lacks something that is needed to understand the basic premise of the course, this can lead to failure.
The challenge is here: allowing people to better their knowledge with online courses in a way that they have a clear understanding of what resources they need, one step at a time. This is what I feel I’ve been missing a lot. Since I started working in this company, I was allowed to get online courses and I could choose which ones to do based on what I thought was needed (e.g. Linux network troubleshooting). It’s all nice and cool but if you follow a course on Linux network troubleshooting, you would first need to understand networking, otherwise most of it will just fly over your head.