I think one of the tragedies of the public school system is they don’t teach study skills to students of all ages.
I struggled through public school and university and it wasn’t ’till I enrolled in graduate school at Western Washington University for an M.Ed in Art Education that I took a course in study skills. Study skills is a simple system of programming the super computer, the human brain. However it does require hard work but, once done, is a very efficient system. You take the text book and condense the chaff down to the seeds. You reread that core information (the seeds) over and over until you have almost 100 per cent retention. Suddenly to my great delight I went from a struggling student to straight As! Another trick to the system is you keep ahead of the teacher. Since you have done your research on the course you already know the days lesson. Rather than being another drone in the classroom you get the teachers attention. You know all the answers ahead of time.
Years ago I wanted to take a course on the Renaissance in Florence. Rather than listen to a Professor for 3 months and pay a lot of money I went to the UBC books store and bought the text book for the course.
It was huge and I crunched the whole text according to the study skills system. It took awhile (not three months) and I taught myself the whole course. With the money I saved I put on my backpack with my youth hostel card and flew to Florence.
I visited all the site I have researched in the course. Renaissance painting in the Uffizi, climbed Giotto’s tower to see a panorama of the city, the David at the Academia, the Bronze gates of Ghiberti and of course the Ponto Vecchio the bridge where Michelangelo walked.
I still remember all that information thanks to study skills and that’s 30 years ago!
Need I say more!
Brian Scott,
Black Creek
