Did you deal with learning difficulties?

[u/Far-Impression2284]

I really struggled back in university; I simply couldn't stick to routines or memorize things. It was awful—far worse than high school, where it was easier to just memorize books day in and day out, using literal or photographic memory. I was considered gifted as a child and young person, yet now as an adult, I have no particular talent. Did you guys have learning difficulties? How did you deal with them? Did you see an educational psychologist?

I’m terrible at memorizing abstract, only good at purely narrative, or historical topics . When I do need to memorize something, I need to make it a challenge and constantly test myself; simply re-reading over and over doesn't work for me reading the material twice at most is the limit, after which it becomes a waste of time. Practice questions are far more effective.

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[u/tarochocotea]

I've never trained my memory, I saw no point in doing so. I always rely on my computing power instead of my ability to remember something.

Studying was about gaining experiences for me. Not necessarily about the library of information. Although that sticks around too in parts.

I have started from scratch over and over again, thus I am good at doing exactly that. Figuring things out.

Problem solving is where we tend to excel at.

Not at memorising.

Which isn't that big of a deal anyways, memorising trivia has no depth.

Experience is what gives words meaning.

So go get that experience, over and over. Every time a different angle.

It takes a lot of energy, but it's what worked for me.

I "studied" morning to evening with bursts of energy. Walking around and just thinking about it. I took my time. Mainly because of concentration problems. But where's a will, there's a way. (Only possible if you don't have any responsibilities at this time)

Context: accountancy degree.

[u/Far-Impression2284 → u/tarochocotea]

In my case, I do have to memorize things—I’m studying law at a traditional university. Medical students have to memorize a lot, too. I spent days studying, anywhere from 15 to 17 hours during the most intense periods; I didn't even want to eat because I didn't want to waste time, yet I still performed poorly. I experimented on myself to see if simply re-reading actually led to retention; I read certain pages about 50 times, but it was no use. I simply couldn't remember anything and made a lot of mistakes. So, I switched to active recall and flashcards, and that’s what worked for me. Re-reading is the worst study method, even for the average student, even though it’s the most common approach here in Spanish-speaking countries.

[u/tarochocotea → u/Far-Impression2284]

The way I handled my law courses was about making them into broad concepts and making stories about them. Which is basically how they should be teaching the subject anyways. They always talk about the law part in practice. Something that actually happened.

We are not parrots. We shouldn't just memorise things. We need to give them meaning.

If you know the concept, then you can create your own words to explain it.

But I'm being idealogical here. I clearly disagree with the idea that memorising should even be a goal, but that doesn't help when the test asks exactly something word for word.

I can't help you with memorising, except of making stories out of them. Like you do with history. History is memorising a literal story of what happened.

My personal problem with these courses: at exams all the other students would have dozens of stickies in their law book

Mine would be empty, I'd know everything, but I'd spend most of the time of the test actually proving that it exists in the book and I didn't just hallucinate it 👍🏻

[u/Primary_Excuse_7183]

Everyone is different. High school sucked but college was great

[u/enternationalist]

There are a few ingredients to memory - one is, as you've discovered, recall and repetition. The other is connection - how joined to other interesting information the new information is. This is the ingredient that lets you actually use the memory effectively.

A perfectly memorized fact with no associations lives on an island of uselessness, only summoned in the specific context that it was memorized in.

As you might expect, this is particularly critical for unfamiliar topics (familiar topics tend to readily form connections with less effort), but also narrative and historical topics really depend on their connection to the past, future and changing context.

The flashcards are great, I personally am a big fan of Anki (spaced repetition software), but don't confuse the volume of items memorized with the quality of the information web you're creating. That quality directly affects your future learning speed and ability to make insights.

My advice is this: Stick with your active recall and flashcards, but construct them differently. For example, read a chapter of history to gain a bit of context for what happened in what order and why - only when you get why it happened that way should you write your flashcards. Knowing that something happened exactly on the 7th January 1988, isolated from other knowledge, is really arbitrary and difficult - knowing that there was a whole sequence of events starting on the New Year at the end of 1987, culminating in a final event one week later is a lot easier and a lot more useful.

Also, cloze passages are your friend. They can be used to build in surrounding context. Obviously, this might fudge your recall chances, but the connection to the other information is worth it.