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Meta-learning...

The last but one month has been a frantic shuffle through online CMEs and completing other courses which I fancied along the way one of which was the TEFL.Now I cannot make up my mind whether to register for the Oxford university's online course on advanced creative writing .I have done one course already with Elizabeth Garner which was fun because there was a lot of interaction and feedbacks and I just enjoy the process of writing.One important feedback I remember I got from her then was the fact that I never explained what the charecter in the story I was writing were thinking.I was a little taken aback and wondered if it was a psychological thing ,I have never pursued it,so I still don't know the answer.I have considered going for counselling sessions but the questions they ask are things like do you struggle with addiction,do you feel like crying all the time,do you feel sad?,the answer is no to all these things,so I guess I do not qualify for counselling.
One of the take home messages or a reiteration of what I have known all along and have shared with some of my students as well is that when one tries to solve complex issues while learning ,the learning curve dramatically goes up.I used to call it the top down approach while dealing with exams ,etc.
Today being a saturday,I spent some time practising plucking my guitar ,it requires a lot of concentration getting your muscle memory to obey so while I practised it at stretches I used to in between take breaks to play the regular chords .I found that when i had struggled enough with the strings the regular chords sounded better and I found myself getting more experimental with the music I normally play and I was more confident.The lesson is don't play it safe,go for it.
Meta-learning is a fascinating subject and it might help to introduce bits of it in the school curriculum so that the students are thinking as they are going through the entire schooling process instead of mindless mugging which is often how it is done,atleast that was how it was done.
At this age one learns while preparing for exams ,it is more effective to have subject based goals rather than time based goals to be more efficient.For instance,instead of charting out two hours of studies,I chart out fifty MCQs in this sitting.Maximum time one can actually concentrate on a particular subject is limited so it better to pepper the study time with recreation times in between so that the out-put is maximum instead of just holing oneself with books for hours at a stretch.
Sleep is absolutely essential for assimilating all that has been learnt so if someone thinks one can max a paper by studying without sleeping on the last day one is wrong.,,,there is another one,the environment in which one learns is essential when trying to remember facts ,for instance if one has a habit of learning with music on it is bad because music is not the accepted norm where one would have to recollect the fact ,both adults and children have better learning when there is application of the learning in their every day setting so I guess as far as clinics are concerned one might learn a lot more while at work than while burning the midnight oil behind a desk...and it goes on.

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