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For reasons that I don't really understand, my brain has gotten on a learning kick. It started a few weeks ago when someone posted a link to an online class that taught music theory, a subject I studied a loooooong time ago in school and never felt like I had a really good handle on it. The fact that I didn't feel like I ever had a good understanding of it was the main motivation. I don't have any specific reason to learn music theory, other than I don't know it already, and it interests me. It's not with any end goal in mind other than to just have the knowledge.
Then a couple of weeks ago, I found a website called Coursera (how is this pronounced? Course-era? Course-rah?) that is an aggregating site for universities all over the world to post their on-line classes. You can pay money to have them proctored and get a certificate of completion (and they make sure to remind you of this option constantly), or you can just take them for fun. So that's what I've been doing.
I picked a couple of courses that have familiar subjects to me, but still have new information. One is on positive psychology, which is a field that was just barely getting any attention when I graduated with my psych degree. The other one is Buddhism and Modern Psychology, and the melding of these two topics is fascinating. Week Three's coursework is entitled "Does Your Self Exist?" There's a hell of a question!
My favorite one though is called How Things Work. It's an intro to physics. Our high school physics teacher was well-known to be a genius who could not teach his way out of a wet paper bag, and I wanted to keep up my GPA. I avoided high-level math courses for the same reason. I think math and physics do not come easily to my liberal arts brain, but I've got enough intelligence to pick up at least some of it. I took an assessment test (which I'll take again at the end of the course) and got 4 of 21 questions right. That's terrible, but also that's great because it means I have pretty much nowhere to go but up.
Last night I took the first quiz, and failed spectacularly. I took it a second time and juuuuust barely passed. Then I took it a third time, and asked JD (who knows physics well) to help me work through the answers, explaining the things I didn't understand. I still marked the same ones wrong so I wouldn't have an inflated grade, but he helped me understand a lot of the concepts a lot better, and it was a fun evening.
I had mentioned to him that I'd chatted a little with Eric about trying to understand his job better- Eric and JD both are computer programmers, but approach it in completely different ways. JD's job is trying to push him to promoting, and part of that means teaching the newbs the ropes of the job. So he decided to teach me very basic programming, and I agreed to be taught, and gave him ways in which he could make things more understandable (short answer- more examples). I wrote a program that said HELLO WORLD because that's traditional. Then I wrote one that gave you the square of a number, and one that had you enter the lake level and then would tell you if it was full, or if it wasn't then by how much. I still don't get some aspects of it, but we kicked around other things I could do, like re-name all of my music files in a different format with the touch of a button!
So yeah. Learning!
Then a couple of weeks ago, I found a website called Coursera (how is this pronounced? Course-era? Course-rah?) that is an aggregating site for universities all over the world to post their on-line classes. You can pay money to have them proctored and get a certificate of completion (and they make sure to remind you of this option constantly), or you can just take them for fun. So that's what I've been doing.
I picked a couple of courses that have familiar subjects to me, but still have new information. One is on positive psychology, which is a field that was just barely getting any attention when I graduated with my psych degree. The other one is Buddhism and Modern Psychology, and the melding of these two topics is fascinating. Week Three's coursework is entitled "Does Your Self Exist?" There's a hell of a question!
My favorite one though is called How Things Work. It's an intro to physics. Our high school physics teacher was well-known to be a genius who could not teach his way out of a wet paper bag, and I wanted to keep up my GPA. I avoided high-level math courses for the same reason. I think math and physics do not come easily to my liberal arts brain, but I've got enough intelligence to pick up at least some of it. I took an assessment test (which I'll take again at the end of the course) and got 4 of 21 questions right. That's terrible, but also that's great because it means I have pretty much nowhere to go but up.
Last night I took the first quiz, and failed spectacularly. I took it a second time and juuuuust barely passed. Then I took it a third time, and asked JD (who knows physics well) to help me work through the answers, explaining the things I didn't understand. I still marked the same ones wrong so I wouldn't have an inflated grade, but he helped me understand a lot of the concepts a lot better, and it was a fun evening.
I had mentioned to him that I'd chatted a little with Eric about trying to understand his job better- Eric and JD both are computer programmers, but approach it in completely different ways. JD's job is trying to push him to promoting, and part of that means teaching the newbs the ropes of the job. So he decided to teach me very basic programming, and I agreed to be taught, and gave him ways in which he could make things more understandable (short answer- more examples). I wrote a program that said HELLO WORLD because that's traditional. Then I wrote one that gave you the square of a number, and one that had you enter the lake level and then would tell you if it was full, or if it wasn't then by how much. I still don't get some aspects of it, but we kicked around other things I could do, like re-name all of my music files in a different format with the touch of a button!
So yeah. Learning!
