It's happening again

Stinicker

A brief background of me, I dropped out of Secondary School in first year at 14. I simply hated to write and taking down notes were the bane of my short existence there. Also having to do homework in the evenings drove me up the walls and I would often refuse to do it leading to conflicts with teachers and me falling behind in studies.

4 years ago I enrolled in a Community College Business PLC course and within 3 days I had given up and gave up the course then. I simply cannot concentrate on things which are not interesting to me. I know it sounds weird but all my life I have been this way and whilst I am very intelligent I tend to learn on my own from books and nowadays the internet. I have learned tonnes of stuff off this website for instance.

As I have no education I decided this year to try and face up to my demons and got enrolled in a FAS course in a subject I have a good enough interest in and started the course last week. Whilst the first few days were all fun and games and getting to know each other this week has seen a knuckling down and already I am disinterested, bored and just fed up, I can't follow the course and do not study, I cannot do study and I rarely did homework in school either. I have to totally separate my personal life from college and I refuse to let one interfere with the other. I am pretty sure at this stage I have some sort of latent learning disability because I cannot concentrate of some things no matter how hard I try and if I am interested in the matter I take to it like a fish to water and totally get it.

I am seriously thinking of dropping out of this course already and I will be back to square one again it seems.

castaway_lady

Either get tested for ADHD or stop being so easy on yourself! What about online learning courses, a tonne of stuff that can be done online these days.

Whether or not you have a learning disability is a matter to take to your doctor. Get on that asap. In the meantime, stick with the course. Some people find learning easier than others, but no one finds it easy all the time. Nearly everyone has parts of their course that they don't like.

I study plants in college, because I like nature and I'd like a career that involves travel and the outdoors. But at the moment, I have to study statistics and numbers and soil chemicals and nitty gritty things about the molecules inside plants. Sometimes I'll let days go by ignoring study because I can't bear it. Sometimes I'll open a book in front of me for the whole day and end up not reading a word of it. Sometimes I HATE it. But I keep going because ultimately I know it's good for me and it's going to get me where I want to go. Sometimes I do an assignment at the very very last minute, because I'd been putting it off for so long, but in the end I just have to convince myself to do it. I find it really hard to concentrate and I spend a lot of my lectures literally asleep.

It's difficult! But you should stick with it. No matter how hard it is, it's better to do it than to drop it. If it turns out that you have a medical condition, then hopefully your doctor can relieve some of the difficulty, but overall you've just got to grin and bear it. It will be good for you.

username123

Unfortunately, to study a subject that interests you, you have to study the fun stuff alongside the boring stuff. If it was easy, everyone would have loads of degrees etc... Its not. It requires buckling down.

Obviously your own inability to study is your subjective experience, so its impossible to say whether you will not buckle down, or cannot buckle down, but definitely see your doctor to ascertain this.

The other thing is, there are all sorts of different ways of learning. Personally I use youtube videos, books, podcasts, teacher/student interaction, rote learning (boring but sometimes necessary with something you just cant get the head around - I often find it comes after repeating it enough times!), writing things down, making mind maps etc....

So there isnt just one way - and maybe you could find a way that suits you.

I cant help but think that if you left school so young you will find it more difficult simply because you never developed the habit of study (I mean if you do not have a learning disability), but with hard work you could find the way of it.

I appreciate its more difficult to concentrate on things we find boring but unfortunately its the reality of learning that we have to learn all kinds of boring rubbish to get to the interesting stuff!!

You should have a look into some of the stuff I mentioned above, mind maps in particular are great for people who have trouble writing boring notes.

castaway_lady

castaway_lady wrote: »

Either get tested for ADHD or stop being so easy on yourself! What about online learning courses, a tonne of stuff that can be done online these days.

Id agree. Our body for example takes in so much additives in food on a daily basis, that its possible we could be over stimulated. Perhaps even supplementing study with excercise could help. Do you play sport or go running/gym OP?

Turtwig

First of all. Give yourself more credit. What you did is fantastic, facing up to past demons is never easy.

Learning is like anything : a skill. The more you practice it the better you get at it. Learning to learn crap you hate is a skill too. It helps of course to have a motivation and interest in the subject. I'd seriously recommend talking to a counsellor if possible. Let them know your past issues with learning. Obviously you might have a learning disability so talk to your GP too but what if what you're experiencing now is just inner conflict, anxiety or something (I'm no counsellor:o) from your past experiences of learning being muddled with your current attempt? Either way, you should make sure to mention everything to your GP and I would recommend trying to talk to a counsellor too.

I'd suggest being pragmatic, the stuff you dislike do the bare minimum to get the grade goal you have set for yourself. Don't kill yourself. Spare your energy and enthusiasm for studying the subjects that interest you. And if you're not currently studying anything of interest, be sure to allow yourself time to do anyway as a form of reward. In the interim see the tedious tasks that you're doing as a means to improve your grafting skills. Maybe look into challenging yourself into producing better prose, mechanics, presentations. etc. And each time try to challenge yourself to doing it more efficiently i.e getting the tedious tasks done faster but better than the previous iteration.

Also experiment. If you're task involves filing out tedious spreadsheets seek out ways to make it more rewarding or fun for you. Maybe it's easier do it with music? Maybe not. Personally speaking what I used to do (so this might not work for you) is use the spreadsheets as a opportunity to test my memory. I'd be copying down a huge sheet of results from a lab experiment which basically involved loads of angle measurements and instead of copying them individually one by one, I'd try to remember as many numbers as possible and then try to plug them into the spreadsheet from memory. It probably meant I took longer at the task (initially!) but it never felt as tedious as just doing the monotonous plug the numbers in one by one. I'd even mix it up by doing first, then third, then last, then fifth, then second, etc.

Stinicker

I dropped out today

curlzy

Awww that's a pity. From the sounds of it, you're either very lazy or you have a learning disability. You need to explore the second possibility, make an appointment with your doctor.

username123

curlzy wrote: »

Awww that's a pity. From the sounds of it, you're either very lazy or you have a learning disability. You need to explore the second possibility, make an appointment with your doctor.

Yeah, agree. Definitely go and see your doctor about this.