Learning Your First Job Leamnson
Leamnson
Learning - Your First Job by Robert Leamnson, Ph D
Robert Leamnson is Professor of Biology & Director of Multidisciplinary Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth
Author of: Learning Your Way Through College: Strategies for Academic Achievement (1994, new edition 2006)
Introduction (Don’t skip this part)
These pages contain some fairly blunt suggestions about what to do in college. Some of them may seem strange to you, some might seem old fashioned, and most will come across as labor intensive. But they have worked very well for many students over the past 20 years, since the first edition came out. This edition is more up to date, but the basic message has not changed much.
A fundamental idea that you will encounter over and again, is that learning is not something that just happens to you, it is something that you do to yourself. You cannot be “given” learning, nor can you be forced to do it. The most brilliant and inspired teacher cannot “cause” you to learn. Only you can do that. What follows are some fairly explicit “learning activities” or behaviors, but they are all your activities, and now and then those of your fellow students. But there is also a basic assumption underlying these ideas, and that’s that you do want to learn something while getting a diploma. Without that desire, nothing will work.
Some words we need to understand
It happens, too often, that someone reads a passage or paragraph, as you are, and gets an idea very different from what the writer intended. This is almost always because the reader has somewhat different meanings for the words than did the writer. So that we don’t have that problem here I’ll make clear the meanings I intend by the words I use. We’ll start with:
Learning:
While few people think of it this way, learning is a biological process. It is indeed biological because thinking occurs when certain webs (networks) of neurons (cells) in your brain begin sending signals to other webs of neurons. You, of
Learning - Your First Job by Robert Leamnson, Ph D
Robert Leamnson is Professor of Biology & Director of Multidisciplinary Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth
Author of: Learning Your Way Through College: Strategies for Academic Achievement (1994, new edition 2006)
Introduction (Don’t skip this part)
These pages contain some fairly blunt suggestions about what to do in college. Some of them may seem strange to you, some might seem old fashioned, and most will come across as labor intensive. But they have worked very well for many students over the past 20 years, since the first edition came out. This edition is more up to date, but the basic message has not changed much.
A fundamental idea that you will encounter over and again, is that learning is not something that just happens to you, it is something that you do to yourself. You cannot be “given” learning, nor can you be forced to do it. The most brilliant and inspired teacher cannot “cause” you to learn. Only you can do that. What follows are some fairly explicit “learning activities” or behaviors, but they are all your activities, and now and then those of your fellow students. But there is also a basic assumption underlying these ideas, and that’s that you do want to learn something while getting a diploma. Without that desire, nothing will work.
Some words we need to understand
It happens, too often, that someone reads a passage or paragraph, as you are, and gets an idea very different from what the writer intended. This is almost always because the reader has somewhat different meanings for the words than did the writer. So that we don’t have that problem here I’ll make clear the meanings I intend by the words I use. We’ll start with:
Learning:
While few people think of it this way, learning is a biological process. It is indeed biological because thinking occurs when certain webs (networks) of neurons (cells) in your brain begin sending signals to other webs of neurons. You, of