Knowledge is Happiness

I would really like to learn to speak more languages. I think it would be really interesting to learn something outside of the Germanic/Romance languages, and even more so something outside of the Indo-European language family, but yet I think it would probably be easiest to branch out slowly. I've been saying for the past few years that I'm going to learn Spanish, but yet I never seem to actually get around to doing so.

I would also like to learn to play more instruments. I already do piano, clarinet, and alto sax, but I would like to know more. I think I'd like to add a string instrument to my repertoire - guitar seems like the obvious choice, I guess. I've been thinking about buying a ukelele to start out on, so I might do that. Someday I would really like to learn the cello - I think they're such a beautiful instrument - but it's really not within my financial means right now, so that will have to wait a while.

I guess really one of the main skills I would like to learn is people skills, but I think those ones just take practice. Things like striking up conversations with strangers, or making new friends more easily, bringing up difficult topics of conversation - those are all things that I've just never been good at.

Knowledge-wise, I would like to learn more science. I really liked physics (and math) a lot in high school, but just not as much as arts, so I didn't really get a chance to continue on with them in university. My best friend/former roommate is a physics student, and one of my other former roommates was in engineering, so just being around them and talking about what they were studying helped a little bit, but I would really like to know more. I thought it would be interesting to learn some biology, too, since the only time I ever studied it was learning the parts of the cell way back in grade nine--but I tried watching Crash Course and after a certain point they were just so full of acronyms and unfamiliar words that I always came out feeling more confused than when I started, so I've resigned myself to just not ever knowing biology.

Anyway, as much as I would really like to know everything, those are the most major ones, so I think I'll close out there.

Where I feel justified in taking a teaching major without becoming a teacher

There were two questions that stuck out to me, one that I'm semi-qualified to answer and the other which I essentially spent four years learning about. So! Un-qualified answer first:

"What was it like to live on your own for the first time? What's most difficult and how do you deal with it?"


I guess I'm really just now living on my own, since rent is no longer optional (hey, it was a commune, things were different!). I'm a big fan of security, so probably the hardest thing for me is dealing with the unexpected things that crop up like, oh hey, my roommate has a horrible virus that is insanely contagious. I'm not allowed to work for a week!

My advice is two-fold; one, figure out ways to cut costs if you need to. I like having three levels of lifestyle: broke (rice, beans, and frozen veggies make up most of my food intake), saving (a couple small splurges here and there) and celebrating (usually for a special occasion), so that if something bad happens I know how to cut everything down to minimum to make up for it. Second, it's good to have an emergency fund as a buffer, and that's just something that needs to be saved up for (see "saving" phase of lifestyle).

For the other question, the answer to which I'll try to keep short and not gush over because this is the first chance I've really had to use my degree since I graduated, is simply "do you have any advice for good studying habits?"


Katie had some great ideas, so I thought I'd recommend a few things that a) I had beaten into my head as a pre-credential teacher and thus want to feel good about telling someone else :P and b) aren't talked about as often.


The first step I highly recommend is taking a learning styles test (I like the one here, though I wish I could find the one I did for one of my classes which showed a neat little graph of 8 separate learning styles). I've heard anywhere from 4-8 proposed styles, but it basically boils down to what sense you use to absorb information - sight, sound (both heard and spoken by you), or touch ("doing").

I am very, very visual, so I'll tell you what I ended up doing. I wrote notes in class, reread them within a week or so to get a refresher, and throughout the semester put all of them into Evernote (like Katie mentioned, in a simplified format so it wasn't overwhelming to go through them) so that I could have access to them on my phone or on college computers. I usually ended up making two columns, one with terms and the other with definitions, so that one my bus ride to school I could whip out my phone, cover half the screen, and do some quick studying.

Once I started getting more projects and papers assigned than tests, I tried to map out mini due dates for myself (i.e. outline, first draft, second draft, editing, polished draft), but I very often resorted to my failsafe of what my friends and I referred to as "fighting fires". It's very simple: look at what's due in the next week. Work on the very first thing until it's done. Repeat.

If you have lots of big projects that have heavy time investments that won't work well, but as someone who had many many small projects it was functional enough.

I hope this has helped a bit. If you've got any context specific questions (i.e. learning facts or larger ideas; specific learning style, etc) I'd be happy to answer them in the comments, I just don't want this blog to be massive. :)