Hands-on with oxidative phosphorylation. Holla!
The idea of learning how to learn seems a little bit crazy. I mean, we’ve all been learning since birth, right? It’s kind of an innate thing. And hopefully you’ll continue to learn throughout the rest of your life outside of the structure of a formal education.
In college, you’re expected to commit more time to your education outside of class. This can mean homework, studying, labs, and anything that contributes to your absorption of knowledge outside of the time that you spend in a classroom with a professor.
For a long time, this time spent outside of class was pretty frustrating for me. I would stare at my notes for hours, reading things over and over again, just as my friends did, and I never felt like I was completely grasping the material. It wasn’t until I learned about Neil Fleming’s VARK model of learning, which is a commonly used system of distinguishing learning styles. Coming from a very traditional education, where all the learning was done from textbooks and worksheets, I had never really considered that there would be ways to optimize my learning.
Fleming’s VARK model describes four different categories of learning: Visual learners, who learn best by associating information with images and diagrams, auditory learners, who can mainly rely on hearing and speaking to take in information, kinesthetic or tactile learners, who learn best by physically interacting with information, and reader/writers, who can intake information by reading it and copying it.
When I discovered that I’m a kinesthetic learner, everything started to make a lot more sense. I learn best when I have a physical connection with information; I like to navigate through diagrams, move information, have hands-on experiences, and examples. I’ve even found that I can gain more from a paper if I can have my actually touch it while I’m reading it (reading on computers is definitely not for me…my dreams of relaxing by a pool and reading off a kindle will sadly never be realized).
Knowing how I learn best is such a valuable piece of information. I know I can only study with quiet, wordless music, I can’t read in bed, and I now know methods that can help me optimize my study time to take in as much information as possible.
Last week, I had a big biology exam about cellular respiration and photosynthesis. Let me just go ahead and tell you this; cells are insane. So many processes and tiny little things doing a gajillion jobs at once. There’s a system for everything, and I had to know how a lot of those systems work for my exam. I was really struggling with keeping the Calvin cycle straight from the citric acid cycle, and remembering every single step of glycolysis got very confusing, very fast. In my biology lab that week, though, part of the lab involved taping pieces of a cell to the table and moving electrons and protons through some of the processes involved in oxidative phosphorylation. While other students grumbled and moaned about how weird it was, I happily slid electrons around my table, converting ADP to ATP with more clarity than I had about the matter than ever before.
Learning is weird. And just like everything else in your life, it’s something that you do differently from everyone else. To find out more about your learning style, visit here!