This weekend I attended a session with a learning strategist.

It was one of five workshops available at a conference I was attending, and since going overseas to study/work isn’t a possibility and my facebook account is pretty locked down already, the only chance that I was there to learn something and not completely waste my time was with the learning strategist.

She was so good and taught me so much that I am here, duty bound to tell you on Sunday afternoon, share and divulge my secrets rather than horde them on this countdown to midterm weekend.

I thought I have great study habits. Guess who failed her little “how well do you study?” quiz? Yeap.

I’m nothing if not dedicated. Her presentation however was focused on efficiency and she showed me a few nifty tricks.

• Make a list of what you need to know. This is especially important if your teacher doesn’t give you any kind of review before an exam. She recommended showing it to your teacher and asking if it was comprehensive. In her experience, if the teacher did point out something that was missing, it was usually a crucial concept and on the exam.
• Summarize the book and what you need to know between your in-class notes and maybe through home notes, but put the textbook away after that. She says textbooks are too overwhelming. I heart my own, so I was 100% with her on this, but for those less bibliophilic than myself, I can understand it totally.
• Divide what you need to know into three piles.Think of a stoplight – red, green, yellow. She told us that research shows that we study what we already know (!) most. Apparently, we like the good feeling and positive reinforcement so much that we stick with it. Her advice? Put the stuff you know in the “green” pile and only bother reviewing it after a thorough going over of everything else. The yellow pile is for what you sort of know, and of course the red pile is what you do not at all know. Study the red pile first and most. Then hit the yellow. And later review the green.
• Here’s another statistic I had never heard. We remember 5% of what we hear audibly, 10% of what we read and a whooping 90% of what we teach. Go find a study group and teach ‘em something, man. Wow.
• Make up questions from the bold terms and headings in your texbook. She said this partly falls into the “How to take a test well” category because how well we do on a test is not necessarily a reflection of what we know. It IS a reflection of how well we study. And if you are always studying with the question AND answer sitting there staring at you, your brain will totally freak out on you when test time comes and ONLY the question is there.
• Another test-taking tip: cover up the answers of multiple choice questions as you move through them. Those answers are meant to confuse, as we all know only too well. Removing them from the picture allows your brain to recall the information without that distraction and you can proceed to picking a, b, c, d with much more confidence.
• My favourite variation of that advice was this keen idea: cover up those beloved power point slide formatted notes with post-it notes. Write the question on the post-it note, the answer is underneath, and voila! instant test question to quiz yourself or friends. I’ve been doing this as I go through my anatomy today and it’s a whole new world!
  
• Most shocking and revelational to me was the evidence-informed practice (lol) of how soon after a lecture you should be reviewing the material covered. Take a guess..
• Pretty picture break while you think.
• 
• 12-24 hours!!! no seriously, she says it’s proven that one of the best ways to move information from the short term memory into the long term is to review it within one day of the lecture. Obviously, I can’t do that now as I sit and prepare for midterms, but I am going to attempt to do this once we are back into the lecture cycle again. Her advice was not to take too long. A quick review… maybe ten minutes.
• Then the next step for memory retention is to spend an hour at the end of the week reviewing that week’s material. This I already sort of do, but I am going to work on improving.

Please know that this was not all of her advice, but only what stuck out as perfect for me, my life, habits, needs. I would highly recommend seeing a learning strategist yourself. They have so much to offer you.

Good luck on your exams!

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have you read Longfellow’s poem about Florence Nightingale? the romantic side of me is swooning now that I have. see Longfellow is famous in my part of the world for another “little” poem named Evangeline. therefore he is forever enshrined in my heart for knowing, caring and immortalizing two very important parts of my life: my French heritage and my adoration of nursing and Florence particularly.

Santa Filomena

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Whene’er a noble deed is wrought,
Whene’er is spoken a noble thought,
Our hearts, in glad surprise,
To higher levels rise.

The tidal wave of deeper souls
Into our inmost being rolls,
And lifts us unawares
Out of all meaner cares.

Honour to those whose words or deeds
Thus help us in our daily needs,
And by their overflow
Raise us from what is low!

Thus thought I, as by night I read
Of the great army of the dead,
The trenches cold and damp,
The starved and frozen camp, -

The wounded from the battle-plain,
In dreary hospitals of pain,
The cheerless corridors,
The cold and stony floors.

Lo! in that house of misery
A lady with a lamp I see
Pass through the glimmering gloom,
And flit from room to room.

And slow, as in a dream of bliss,
The speechless sufferer turns to kiss
Her shadow, as it falls
Upon the darkening walls.

As if a door in heaven should be
Opened and then closed suddenly,
The vision came and went,
The light shone and was spent.

On England’s annals, through the long
Hereafter of her speech and song,
That light its rays shall cast
From portals of the past.

A Lady with a Lamp shall stand
In the great history of the land,
A noble type of good,
Heroic womanhood.

Nor even shall be wanting here
The palm, the lily, and the spear,
The symbols that of yore
Saint Filomena bore.

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…but my 2nd year nursing student mentor is. And my massage therapist in training that worked out that weird knot in my shoulder today is too.

and guess what? they both want to go to medical school!

what is it with 18 year olds helping along the “mature” thirty-something through school?

i know, i know. it doesn’t really say anything about me but wow is it ever awkward?! and humbling. i was always the big shot around campus, you know. maybe one day i will be again.

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First day of lab and we survived the bed bath! Our teacher was a great lady, making us all comfortable, drawing the quiet ones out to participate, making donning PPE a race and getting everyone to laugh.

Between that and postponing homework for a night of Glee and committing to some kind of exercise daily, I feel so much better. And I’ve realized why this is such a challenge for me — my anxiety. I take medicine that I wanted to get off but a great counselor advised me to try school with the help first. That’s what professionals are for. But even with that help – or crutch as it sometimes feels like – I’ve felt on the edge of breaking. Too much input and not near enough time to process. Hence I heard that same voice in my ear with the other half of the best way to manage anxiety disorder – exercise.

I must exercise. If you have diagnosed anxiety like I do, you need to exercise too.

Yesterday it was throwing ball in the park with my guy. Today I went for a walk and ended up in front of school to meet the kids at the exact right time.

I know I won’t always remember or be disciplined enough to get off my tush, but the hour not spent studying to physically move is so worth it. My mind is clear, I feel ready to tackle hours of reading, essay writing and skill videos. And most of all the stress is way WAY lower. Time to get to it!

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I never thought this day would come. I always wanted to be so terribly careful about I said. I wanted to have a message. Be a leader. Be someone, something, anything. But I have a family, a job, I’m in NURSING school and I’d like to write about it all on my blog. So the day has come.

This blog is officially a “whatever I feel like it today” blog.

Today there was panic and loneliness, feeling weird, forced extrovertedness, success, laughes and kale chips! Wanna hear about it?

Going back to school is a dream come true. As school drew nearer over the summer, my long awaited excitement slowly became a dawning anxiety and nameless general fear.

The first days were a blur, keeping my head above water, orientating myself to college as a mature student, to a system of education in a different country, to a university nursing program instead of the diploma one, to new people, to buses that don’t go the direction I think they will, to where to park and how to find food.

The second week was one long sugar craving. Seriously.

The third turned serious. Two quizzes and a first assignment due changed everything, and I went even more overboard than needed, totally killed a quiz my eleven year old daughter could have passed and am rethinking everything.

Hence, I’m blogging.

But today, wow, what a rollercoaster.

It occurred to me that we have our first skills lab on Monday – we get to bathe each other! – and that I’d better ask around to the few people I feel comfortable with to find a partner. My efforts gave me the impression that everyone else seemed to have paired up already and that I was a really late bloomer and would probably have a total stranger giving me a bed bath! This did not help that general nervousness and overwhelmedness.

I took my sad sorry self to the library to watch the skills video in preparation and found that my cat had eaten through my headphone wires. Strike two for the day. I kicked myself out of my hidey hole however and went over to the “caf” which in Canadian college speak means the cafeteria. And yes, it has it’s very own… you guessed it… Tim Hortons. When I saw some girls in my classes, I literally forcefully willed that I must ask them to sit and chat over lunch together. Natural for me would have been to sulk.

Miraculously it worked. We ate, we “studied” in the library, I found someone available to partner with before our next class, our teacher had us play a nursing board game for two hours which was JUST the break that everyone needed, we laughed and I came home to make mini crustless quiches and kale chips for supper. My ten year old son is eating the leftover kale by the handful as I type. I kid you not! Try them, you’ll love them. Just take it from me… don’t overdo the salt!

G’night, back to student mode.

p.s. and anyhow i really need somewhere to break grammatical rules and not captitalize personal pronouns just so i can pretend i’m heckling professors and their personal pet peeves. not to mention, i NEED somewhere to write creatively because they are making me be straightforward and concise and direct and… worst of all, without metaphor! /swoon

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