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How To Study When You Can’t Remember Anything You Read
Studying is so much more than memorization.
Straight A’s from elementary to grad school
Long story short, I did well in school. Scholarships, awards, the accolades…that was me. From pop quizzes to mid-terms to final exams, in my life, I excelled at thousands of them, passing with flying colours. It didn’t matter which subject it was (Maths, Biology, History, Chemistry, English etc). I used a similar approach to studying and it worked every time.
I’m a Millennial and when I was growing up, the school system was designed for people who could retain information like a robot.
Read and regurgitate.
Input and output.
Rinse and repeat.
I realized at a young age that I didn’t learn by reading. I was the square peg entering a system of round holes. Along with looking different (being one of few Asian kids in a predominately Caucasian school), eating different food, and speaking a different language, there were many things I had to do differently and that included how I learned and studied.
So throughout my school years, I created my own tactics to study, learning in a way that worked well for me. However, there was a time I felt inadequate and went against what I knew about myself.
Highlighting entire pages
I started university in 2004. I was a Science major studying to attain a degree in Biomedical Physiology and Kinesiology; however, for some reason, I decided to take an archaeology course. You know, to expand my horizons as a young adult.
This was the first time I had ever been assigned specific textbook pages to read called ‘readings’. These were to be completed before a lecture so that I could better understand what the professor was talking about.
I was shocked but also a bit scared. I was no longer the big fish in the small cesspool that was high school. I was at University. This was different. There was a woman in her 30s sitting beside me, a couple of dudes with grey hair and people who looked super smart in my class. They brought their own laptops, multi-coloured planners and…
