One of the toughest classes I have taken in full educational career was in high school. Sure, I have taken classes that are technically more work and the material is more advanced, but my high school Honors Chemistry class was the one that was the most difficult to me. It may have been because I was grazing my way through high school, doing the bare minimum to still do well. It had been working, as I made As and Bs in my classes, but I had no real method to learning. That’s why this class really got to me, I couldn’t just go to class, listen, and understand the material. I had to work hard for it.
It was my junior year of high school, which is now about five years ago, when I took this class. The class started off okay, but after the first quiz, I knew I had to step it up. I apparently didn’t though, because I still did awful on the first test. At that point I had to get outside help. I had a friend named Luke in that class who I knew was doing pretty well. I asked him if he would help me review our past test during our lunch/study period. I agreed to it along with another struggling friend of mine. Just in that one hour long study session I began to realize how wrong my understanding of the material was. Fortunately for me, Luke offered to meet with us every lunch to work on chemistry; we jumped at the idea.
Every day for a few weeks the three of us would gather at the library for an hour and study. Luke would re-teach lessons we learned in class, giving us time to ask specific questions on what we needed. It was nice to have a “teacher” that gave us one on one attention instead of a teacher that had to go through a lecture and only answer a few questions. Luke also showed us ways he memorized formulas and we would brainstorm to come up with new methods to remember them. I finally started building systems to remember information. He would also explain how to find the most important information from a lecture, that way we didn’t have to completely rely on him. As the semester continued, I began to use more and more learning mechanisms to absorb the important information that I needed to from lessons and readings. I kept my notes organized and studied a lot.
The hard work paid off, as I passed the class with a B. Not an A, but after the first quiz and test, I was surprised I was even able to pass at all. What I learned from this experience is that I had to find methods that specifically helped me learn, versus methods teachers use that may not apply to everyone. I also had to find which systems worked best for the type of information I was trying to learn. I couldn’t use just one way of learning for everything. I think that because of this experience I have been able to adapt to different professor teaching styles in college and find my own ways to success.