Independent Learning

For eight years before starting college, I was home educated. Lots of people found this quite strange (and many people still do to be honest), and wondered whether coming out of a school environment would harm my chances later on. I suppose the prevailing image of home educators as spiritual worshipping-the-mother-goddess-hippy-types didn't really do much good for the perception of the decision, but nonetheless, I left school. I had the usual tirade of 'How does she socialise?' 'Who teaches you?' and so on for many years (again, I still do), however my responses of 'I socialise a lot more out of school than I ever did within school' and 'I teach myself' usually shut people up.

In school, my life was hell. I was bullied for being top of the class (I still get snide comments and derision from a lot of people - difference is now I just don't care and I'm proud of what I'm doing), and I simply wasn't learning. The people who know me realise that I love to be stretched. I'm not happy unless I'm really learning things. I like being confused, then finding a solution to a problem. Home education allowed me to do this. If I found a topic interesting, I'd go and learn about it. I'd often give myself projects to do, and would devote myself to asking questions and finding the answers myself. I think this is perhaps a reason why I want to go into a research career. There's only so much you can learn from existing knowledge and the chance to create new knowledge is a step up. I digress...

When I negotiated my way out of home educated life and into college, I thought that the step from GCSEs to A-Levels would allow me to be stretched once more. To be honest, it didn't really happen like that. Sure, I worked hard and learnt a lot, but it wasn't necessarily 'difficult'. Exams are always something I've done well at - they don't test your knowledge per se, but rather they test your ability to pass exams. Finding out the best exam technique is what gets you the marks, and this is something I've figured out early on.

Of course, once I'd gained everything I possibly could from college, I moved on to university. I never wanted to go to university. I didn't think it was for me - I thought it was for those rich kids who had previously had a private education. Still, one of my tutors in college suggested that I'd find it a challenge - I'd learn a lot, and meet like-minded people who also wanted to learn. So, I applied.

Now, before you get the wrong idea after reading the following pages, let me be clear on something. I don't regret coming to university. Far from it. It's been one of the best experiences of my life, and I'm eternally grateful to that tutor who told me to go. I've met some amazing and inspiring people, and it's given me a stepping stone for my future.

However, I don't feel I've been challenged enough. My placement year was perhaps an exception to this notion - when you're on your first day of placement and you have to run an EEG with a seriously ill patient, that's a challenge, believe me. During the rest of the time, I think I could have learned more and done more. I'm not saying that the three (nearly four) years have been completely without their difficult moments - negotiating six exams in second year was definitely a tricky one - but overall I feel that most of my degree has been repetition.

Year 1 for example was pretty much a repeat of my A-levels, the only difference being statistics (which I had never done before). Even then, statistics wasn't difficult (stem and leaf diagrams and calculating the mean were a large part of the exam I took). To be honest, I had expected this anyway. On a personal note, I think the social side was more of a challenge than the academic. Living with housemates who were the complete opposite to me in terms of personality, and trying to find a group of friends who were similar to me were more difficult than the coursework. In first year, we also had to take classes about our studying technique. This was a bit of a contentious point for me - after eight years of being home educated, I was well aware of what worked well for me and what didn't work so well. I didn't need to do a quiz about 'what kind of learner' I was. I didn't need to be told that an essay had a beginning, a middle and an end (surely this is common knowledge anyway?). No matter, I'd assumed it was just part of the process of settling in to university life.

Year 2 was challenging in terms of the work load, rather than the work content. Statistics brought with it group work, which was fine on some levels, and not so fine on other levels. When you're working with someone who's 'aiming for 40%' and you're looking for high firsts, you have to expect problems. What was surprising, was the fact that we still had 'study skills' seminars. Yes, again we were told that an essay had a beginning a middle and an end. Apparently the aim of these seminars was to help us become independent learners...

Now that I'm in my final year, I thought that perhaps I'd finally see an end to the whole 'independent learner classes' thing. Not so. Last week, I had a lecture about 'what is a journal article', in which we learnt how to read and evaluate articles. This surprised me, as I figured that most students should be able to do this by their final year of university, and something very wrong must have happened if students were incapable. Still, it was the first week and perhaps things would be different.

Well, this week it seems I have a lecture about 'how to write an essay'. Over the course of my degree, I have lost count of the number of essays I have written. I knew from the outset that an essay has a beginning, a middle and an end. I'd be astounded if anyone on my course didn't realise this. To be honest, I find lectures like this less helpful, more patronising. I've never been very good at 'learning' things I already knew. I remember when I was around 6 years old coming out of a class and throwing my homework at my Mum because we'd been asked to spell things like 'I' 'We' 'Are' 'You' and 'A'. I knew all of this, and it made me angry that we were going over it all again. I suppose I still feel the same way.

Similarly, last week we had an introduction to a module that I already disliked - even before starting. In the introduction, it was explained to us that a lot of psychology graduates lacked the ability to be self-directed learners. Thus, we were taking this module to be taught how to be self-directed. Can anyone else see the flaw in this?

Apparently, my university can't see the issue, so I'll spell it out. In order to become a self-directed or independent learner, you have figure things out on your own. You shouldn't be spoon-fed information. Going away and finding this out for yourself is important. So, having someone teach you how to learn by yourself is a bit of a contradiction in terms. Perhaps I'm too cynical, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks this way. In any case, by the final year of university, I expected people to know how to study. I suppose overall my opinions on this haven't changed throughout my life. I can still see the angry six-year-old in me coming to the surface when I have classes about this. All I can hope for is that the coming weeks will be more related to psychology, and less about how to study.