I forgot I don't have any self-discipline?
I dug around in my room and found my organic chemistry textbooks. Yes, "textbooks" plural. There are four of them. Only two are really important right now. There's the main textbook, which is nice and heavy like a textbook should be. It's the most important one. There's study guide & solutions manual, a companion to the main textbook. This will be helpful because I can make an attempt at any section of problems in the main textbook and go to the solutions manual to correct my work. There's also my lab notebook, which has records of what I did in the lab. Cool, but not particularly useful. Lastly, there's a lab manual with instructions for experimental procedures and such. Potentially useful because it provides details on setting up apparatuses used in lab techniques.
I pretty much have the materials I want in order to start re-educating myself on this stuff, but no real method. Which is why I'm soliciting suggestions here. Has anyone reading this been successful in the past with self-teaching and/or studying a subject? I know I sure haven't. Is there a certain amount of material I should resolve to get through in a week? A month? A day (not sure if I can do this daily)? Should I stick with my textbooks or try to complement them with internet research? Should I focus on reading or on drilling homework problems? I'm really uncertain about all of this and more. I don't know how many times in the past I've thought about how cool it would be to do something very much like this and given up before I'd really even started. I don't want this to be like those times. Which is the main reason I'm writing this entry.
My plan right now is twofold: study some material, writing down notes about that material and doing problems from the book based on that material, then post here about how I did, my impressions, and what the material I've been studying means. I'm not sure if this is a good idea. I'm flipping through my textbook now and I can see that the first few chapters are really basic stuff I already remember pretty well and could easily write interesting things about. In fact, I'm confident that I can write meaningful entries that you should get something out of up until I start getting into the reactions. Organic chemistry is different from what one might expect. One thing that fascinates me about it is that compounds are puzzles and the pieces needed to construct an organic compound are reactions. A big challenge when I was taking these classes was memorizing and applying these reactions.
I still don't know what this is going to look like, though. Maybe not everyone reading this journal wants a ton of detailed science entries taking up space. I could start a new journal and use that one for this endeavor. It would be partly didactic and partly about keeping myself honest about this whole studying thing. How well I'll fill either role remains to be seen. This journal could be reserved for the really short entries, links to things that amuse me, boring updates about my life, book reviews, etc. The other journal (not sure what to call it yet) could be reserved purely for science. Would anyone be interested in reading it? I promise not to make it ridiculously esoteric, at least not all the time. And it needn't be only organic chemistry.
I'm starting with organic chemistry for several reasons. I'm actually considering majoring in it (a year ago I would not have said this). I have both a good textbook and a solutions manual for the homework problems. I grasped most of the material pretty well when I was paying for classes, but screwed up in myriad ways and want a second chance at this stuff. I'm just not motivated to tackle general chemistry again and it's one of the only other options I was considering for this...
Anyway, if I see some success with this approach for organic chemistry, I could continue with biology or calculus or pretty much anything, although I'll hopefully be going back to school before I get to that stuff, which could complicate things. We'll see. Right now I'm focusing on organic chemistry and I want to make sure this happens rather than just talking about it. Do I stand a chance? Feedback would be appreciated.
Edit: I asked Cameron (who seems to not really use LJ anymore) about this and she thought that I should use the internet as a resource too because I might learn/retain a lot that way and get more varied and/or recent information than I would with just the books. She also suggested setting up a schedule to TRY to stick to and some sort of award system for performing well. I like this idea and will try to set up something like it. Still looking for feedback.
I pretty much have the materials I want in order to start re-educating myself on this stuff, but no real method. Which is why I'm soliciting suggestions here. Has anyone reading this been successful in the past with self-teaching and/or studying a subject? I know I sure haven't. Is there a certain amount of material I should resolve to get through in a week? A month? A day (not sure if I can do this daily)? Should I stick with my textbooks or try to complement them with internet research? Should I focus on reading or on drilling homework problems? I'm really uncertain about all of this and more. I don't know how many times in the past I've thought about how cool it would be to do something very much like this and given up before I'd really even started. I don't want this to be like those times. Which is the main reason I'm writing this entry.
My plan right now is twofold: study some material, writing down notes about that material and doing problems from the book based on that material, then post here about how I did, my impressions, and what the material I've been studying means. I'm not sure if this is a good idea. I'm flipping through my textbook now and I can see that the first few chapters are really basic stuff I already remember pretty well and could easily write interesting things about. In fact, I'm confident that I can write meaningful entries that you should get something out of up until I start getting into the reactions. Organic chemistry is different from what one might expect. One thing that fascinates me about it is that compounds are puzzles and the pieces needed to construct an organic compound are reactions. A big challenge when I was taking these classes was memorizing and applying these reactions.
I still don't know what this is going to look like, though. Maybe not everyone reading this journal wants a ton of detailed science entries taking up space. I could start a new journal and use that one for this endeavor. It would be partly didactic and partly about keeping myself honest about this whole studying thing. How well I'll fill either role remains to be seen. This journal could be reserved for the really short entries, links to things that amuse me, boring updates about my life, book reviews, etc. The other journal (not sure what to call it yet) could be reserved purely for science. Would anyone be interested in reading it? I promise not to make it ridiculously esoteric, at least not all the time. And it needn't be only organic chemistry.
I'm starting with organic chemistry for several reasons. I'm actually considering majoring in it (a year ago I would not have said this). I have both a good textbook and a solutions manual for the homework problems. I grasped most of the material pretty well when I was paying for classes, but screwed up in myriad ways and want a second chance at this stuff. I'm just not motivated to tackle general chemistry again and it's one of the only other options I was considering for this...
Anyway, if I see some success with this approach for organic chemistry, I could continue with biology or calculus or pretty much anything, although I'll hopefully be going back to school before I get to that stuff, which could complicate things. We'll see. Right now I'm focusing on organic chemistry and I want to make sure this happens rather than just talking about it. Do I stand a chance? Feedback would be appreciated.
Edit: I asked Cameron (who seems to not really use LJ anymore) about this and she thought that I should use the internet as a resource too because I might learn/retain a lot that way and get more varied and/or recent information than I would with just the books. She also suggested setting up a schedule to TRY to stick to and some sort of award system for performing well. I like this idea and will try to set up something like it. Still looking for feedback.