About me

As a child, I enjoyed learning. For some reason, despite this fact, I didn’t do well in school. Some part of it may have to do with the weird class system my school used, another part with the bullying I had to endure. In high school, it got so bad that my class teacher and my student advisor both told me that I was “too stupid” for upper secondary school. They advised me to go to vocational school instead, so that’s what I did. It never felt really right. Because of what happened to me as a child and as a teenager, for a long time, I thought I was dumb. Recently I’ve started to notice that my view on myself might have been wrong. It’s a strange thing to suddenly notice that everybody isn’t smarter than me. The people I’ve considered inherently more clever, because of their different paths in life, aren’t in fact always above me. For years, whenever I encountered people who graduated upper secondary school, I overestimated their intelligence - and thus, I underestimated my own. This lead to me having really weird conversations with people because I assumed that if I knew something, they would too. They would not only know about it, they would also have a much higher level of understanding of it than I did. The majority of people also seem to be ashamed of admitting that they don’t know something because they pride themselves on their intelligence. Adding this to the situation, my conversations got even weirder. Anyhow. Around the time that I was about 23, I started to learn different subjects on my own. These were subjects where I felt I was lacking because I had been so weak in school. It wasn’t until a few months ago when my therapist asked me what my method of learning is, that I realised I had been doing something “wrong.” Wrong in this sense is related to the Finnish school system. Whenever I start to learn something new, I compare it in my mind to my old understanding of the topic and see if the previous problems are solved by adding the new knowledge. This has most likely been the problem, my therapist said. It blew my mind. To succeed in the school system, you shouldn’t try to understand, analyse and figure out ways to use new knowledge. Instead, you ought to be able to memorise and recall the information, often only for exams. After that, the knowledge is forgotten. [This, of course, is an exaggeration of how the system works, but sadly the main point remains true. Think about it. How often haven’t you studied like crazy for a test, done it, and been done with it? Not using the information, worst case, ever again? When I realised this, I got mad at myself for not understanding that this was how it had worked. I’ve always thought that I’m bad at mathematics because my high school math grades were poor. It isn’t until recently that’ I’ve been thinking of trying to learn it my way. Whilst searching for methods, I stumbled upon this talk by a woman named Barbara Oakley. That’s what inspired me to start reflecting on myself and on how I learn. For now, this weird text shall serve as my introduction to myself; and I'll leave you readers with this fascinating talk by Barbara Oakley.