I have been a programmer for about 7 years but recently i found out there are some things that give me more satisfaction. Therefore i have been doing lots of reading of stuff like : EQ , advanced learning , speed reading , memory enhancement ... So i decided to start a new topic on this forum. I would like to discuss with all of you about alternative methods of learning. The country where i am from (Romania) has "interesting" learning methods (we have the highest rate of university graduates in the whole world). Yet i found them to be extremelty old-fashioned and extremely low in productivity. To better explain this i will make a short description of the high-school learning system :
High-school starts after other 8 years of study ( this may look obvious but i think there are places where this isn't the same
).
In high-schools (normal ones - i mean not art,craftsman..) there are ,now, 3 main areas : mathematics-computer science , natural science , humanistic.
In the math - Comp. Science area children have the following courses :
- maths -> from probabilities,comb, to analysis,linear algebra. (analysis is teached in the last to years)
- comp. science -> starts with basic algorithms and finishes with graph optimization, tree structures, hash , advanced algorithms : dinamic programming , memory and speed optimizations.
- ...... i will detail other courses in the next posts.
All of this courses are taught in a stiff rigid mode :
teacher comes and "speaks" the lesson , using only the blackboard, some examples are written , a homework is given .. the student learns the lesson . after every lesson , the teachers "randomly" calls students to the blackboard (computer) and gives them a problem which they must solve. Depending on the solution (answers) the student gets a mark. In a single course a student can get from 3,4 up to 12 marks (a semester) . There is a final semester exam which counts as 35% of the final grade ( and marks make up for the rest - the procents might we changed since i finished high-school)...
My questions, for now, are :
1. What kind of new learning teaching techniques do you know ? Where can i learn about them ? (example : mind-mapping -> search on the google directory for related sites ; good mindmap design software - FreeMind (Java open source) )
2. From you own experience, what methods did u use to learn better,faster,easiar ? ( like : i would make breathing exercises before starting to learn, i would have classic music on , ... )
3. Do you know any good speed reading learning techniques ? related sites ? free ebooks ?
good day !
lucian
