Learning Curves (Aimee)

Hi there, dear reader! How are you doing on this fine (oh, who am I kidding!) blizzard-like (!) winter morning?

All good? Excellent! Shall we proceed?

Since the day I was born… (I know this sounds like the start of a snore-inducing nostalgia rant, but bear with me!!) Ahem! Since the day I was born, my parents and teachers have endlessly showered me with (not to mention lathered, rinsed and repeated!) the same three words : “Do your best”. Being a self-proclaimed, to-infinity-and-beyond perfectionist, I’ve applied them to my studies in the same way that I apply vegemite to my morning toast – with two tablespoons worth of enthusiasm! (What??? It tastes good!)

Sure, the whole “you can only do your best” thing is a bit clichéd, but when you’re about to do a big scary exam or submit a 2500 word assignment (which can be even bigger and scarier!) it’s comforting to know that you’ve done all that you can do. No questions asked. Story – end of.

Unless of course, you do your best and it doesn’t work.

A few weeks ago, this exact thing happened to me. I had an Italian test on prepositions (the most evil grammatical constructions known to mankind!!) and boy, did I try hard! I rewrote all my notes (twice!), I did all the practice exercises in my book and on the LMS. When this didn’t work, I even went to my professor, screaming ‘AIUTO!’, and borrowed his book on prepositions so that I could become the biggest crammer in all of cram history. Without a doubt, I did the best that I knew how. Surely then, I smashed the test and got H1s all round?

Well, not quite. In fact, not nearly quite!

The fact is: I stuffed up. Big time. It was probably the worst mark I’ve ever got in my life. The kind of mark that would make any self-respecting uni student want to build a tent out of their bed-covers and live there permanently with a torch, their favourite stuffed-toys and a box-set of ‘Gilmore Girls’. (You’ve never built a tent out of bed-clothes before?? Disgraceful!!! Finish this blog and start constructing one at once!!) To be perfectly frank, I didn’t give a baboon’s bottom about the fact that I’d done my best. All that mattered was that I’d made a complete monkey of myself.

Ah me, what a sob story! So, where to from here?

It took me a long time (not to mention several boxes of Kleenex) for me to get to where I am on this issue. And the conclusion I’ve come to is this: it’s not what you do that matters, but how you do it. Sure, it’s great to do your best. Yet, if you want to succeed, you have to do your best in the right way. Example: instead of re-writing all those notes and reading my teacher’s book, I really should have been doing more exercises. Not only this, but instead of just doing the exercises, I should have reviewed my mistakes and done the exercises again until the mistakes were no more. By doing my best in the right way and studying smart, instead of hard, I got to redeem myself in the final exam and nailed it. (Take THAT you position-indicating grammatical pains-in-the-backside!!)

But, heck – I hear you all protesting – Aimee, you didn’t know any of this before you did the test! How could you possibly have prevented this?

Well, that brings me to my next inspirational reflection.

People so often think that learning, if you plotted it on a graph, would look like a nice steep diagonal ascent. You know – kind of like Superman in tights-wearing aerodynamic flight?

Actually, as a wise person once told me, learning does not happen in perfectly straight ascending lines. (I wish!) Most of the time, it’s more like a huge whacky bonkers zig-zag which, most of the time, is turning upward. Though it can go down, left, right or side-ways, depending on the mood you’re in and how much attention you paid in yesterday’s lecture. If, like me, you utterly and irrevocably mess something up, it doesn’t mean that you’re a failure at life. (No, seriously!!) All it means is that, right now, you’re in one of those whoopsy-daisy downward curvy bits. These spiky little down-turns are not blips on an otherwise perfect graph – they are where most of your learning occurs. If you make the most of them, you won’t “prevent” another stuff-up, but you will prevent yourself from stuffing up in the same way twice. What I’m trying to say is: don’t just do your best and be done with it. Do your best to learn from your mistakes. This will make your zig-zag graph turn sunny-side up! (At least, for a bit… until the next hell-sent preposition-equivalent comes along to terrorise – I mean, improve! – your learning experience.)

And, while we’re on the subject, stop turning mistakes into the enemy!!! I’d say part of the reason that we have all these ‘do your best’ clichés is that society wants us to feel like failing is a bad thing. This way, we will aim to be successful all the time and keep society running smoothly. (Well, dang it, society!) This is completely the wrong attitude. Any mistake you make is not comparable to General Zod or Kryptonite Man. Mistakes are your FRIENDS. They are learning curves which are designed to turn you into a cooler underpants-on-the-inside version of Clark Kent.

Don’t let a little learning curve defeat you! Don’t let pesky prepositions defeat you!! Do your best in the best possible way and I promise you that you will SHINE!

Aimee