Studying
is hard for anyone—all you need to do to be convinced of that is log on to
Pinterest or Tumblr for a while, to see what students have to say about the
process. (Personally I find Tumblr’s
assessment of the subject more interesting than Pinterest’s offerings of ways
to optimize study time; to the left is one of my favorites, borrowed from user
the-dutch-student.) I myself have never
been very good at studying, which may surprise those of you who know me as a
conscientious student. The thing is, my
high school never challenged me enough to elicit much studying, and by the time
I had made it into college my habits were set.
I would often tell myself the night before a big test that if I didn’t
already know the material, I wasn’t going to learn it in a few hours.
But
now I’m running into a problem. I am a
Christian, and the past few years I’ve been trying to get deeper into my faith,
to understand its history and culture so that I can enrich my own beliefs. The natural starting point for this is to
read the Bible, but I am coming to understand that it isn’t quite so
simple. You don’t get very much out of
the Bible if you just read it; it requires study and interpretation. Different passages in the Bible can interpret
one another, while there are several hundred years of history behind the stories
and laws. Unless you really take the
time to study and pay attention, you miss a lot.
Hence
my problem. I want to get everything I
can get out of the Bible, but it’s hard to persuade myself to sit down and put
the necessary effort into it. However enjoyable
and fulfilling this text may be, studying is studying, and I find myself
immediately transported back into the mindset of a student not wanting to do
homework simply because it is homework.
I
had to make the task more agreeable somehow.
How can I bully myself into getting the work done? Well, to take a new perspective, of
course. What if I had the Bible in an
electronic format, where I could search for certain names and place, keep track
of my own opinions and interpretations alongside those of eminent biblical
scholars, and color-code trouble spots and favorite verses? That thought appealed to the bespectacled
little person in my self-image who thinks it’s fun to organize things. But, I thought to myself, I don’t know where
I could find such a thing. Ergo, I’ll
have to make it myself. So here I am,
engaged in a project that will probably take me several years: typing up the
Bible into a computer document.
“Wait,
what? But Eileen, why would you do such a
dumb thing? It’s twice as much work as
just studying.” Yes, you’re quite right,
my imaginary critic. But funnily enough,
this project suits me. I type very
quickly, and so it isn’t hard to get through a few chapters a week—I’m in
Leviticus right now. And the act of
copying makes me pay more attention to the text than I would if I were simply
speed-reading my way through. I make
footnotes of my own assessments and questions, to which I can refer back when
something new reminds me of something I read a few weeks ago. And sometimes I find myself spending extra
time researching a particular passage or verse, trying to find something that
will make it more clear.
The
point I’m trying to make is that however silly this idea may seem to many of
you, it works for me. I’m not only
learning, I am retaining what I’ve learned, which is the whole point of
studying. And I’m enjoying the process, which is definitely not the point of
studying, but maybe it should be. So the
next time you’re having trouble on a test or wanting to educate yourself about
something new, maybe don’t bother with those tips and tricks on Pinterest. Think about the way you learn best, and come
up with an idea that works for you.
Everyone is different, but we should all be able to enjoy learning, and
the only person who can make that happen, really, is you.
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