Learning how to learn again
At the end of last year I made the decision to step (some would say “run away”) from the career that spanned consulting to working as Cloud Engineer (no not the rain clouds, I did not control the weather) and finally as a DevOps engineer I had been building since I graduated from university to do a field guide course and potentially pursue it as a long term career change.
Little did I know how much of a change it was actually going to be. Don’t get me wrong, I knew it was going to be very different to the office job where I was spending most of my day behind a laptop in an air conditioned office. I knew I would go from driving a keyboard to driving a game viewer, what I didn’t take into consideration was that I had completely forgotten how to be a student and learn.
I definitely had not stopped learning after university, I had just changed how I was learning new things. Everything I learnt was very temporary and very quickly forgotten after the completion of a project. And everything was very easy to relearn again because it was just one quick google away. I had lost the ability to store knowledge long term.
I very quickly realised that this inability to store knowledge long term spanned more than just the workplace. I was so used to having technology as a crutch that I didn’t worry about having to remember street names, or how to cook a certain recipe. Everything was just a quick search away.
So now I quickly had to learn how to remember things without referencing Google, or even referencing books. I had to use my brain to absorb knowledge long term for the first time in years.
The one commitment I made to myself was to not just learn by cramming everything for a test and then forgetting them as soon as I had passed. This felt very short sighted and for once I tried to use my age and wisdom to not be stupid (this does not happen very often or at all). I wanted to make sure that whatever I learnt was to become a part of my long term knowledge base.
So how was I supposed to do this?
To be honest I still don’t really know. I had committed to put in the work and the first two tests were just theory tests and were relatively easy. All I had to do was read through the notes and text book and make sure I remembered enough to pass. This was relatively easy but still stressful.
Then the real fun started, it was the horror of the practical tests, with the first test being botany. Botany was (and still is) my absolute nemesis, everything looked the same to me. While everyone else was talking about leaf structures and different types of bark, all I could see was that all the leaves were green and the bark was brown. Obviously I didn’t do very well in the first practical test. This felt like a massive punch in the gut.
I knew there were a few more of these types of tests in the next month so I tried to start putting in the work early. Especially for the slides and sounds.
But first I had to get through two weeks of track and sign. And there was no book that was going to teach me everything about this, it was all practical and looking at tracks out in the wild. Unsurprisingly I had a very difficult time at identifying the tracks at first. There might even have been a few times where I got close to losing my temper completely. But I persevered and when the assessment day came around I decided to just have fun with it and go with my gut (this is a different way to say that I just did a very educated guess on each of the tracks and didn’t overthink it). And somehow I walked away with the top mark for track and sign (I am still not convinced this is correct and worry that I might get a call because someone actually made a mistake).
The next few assessments were identifying animals from a picture or the sound they make. Let me be really honest, I didn’t know there were so many snakes and insects that looked almost identical (snakes identical to snakes and insects identical to insects, I am at least smart enough to know the basic differences between a snake and an insect).
And don’t even get me started on the birds! It was crazy, but once again I persevered!
I was slowly starting to be able to identify a lot more than I thought I ever could. But there were two medium sized spanners that were in the works.
The first was a case of tick byte fever where I lost almost a week of studying before the first test (luckily I didn’t even have a chance to stress about this test because I was too busy focussing on just surviving).
The second slightly larger spanner was learning to identify a bird by the sound it makes. Beyond a few obvious ones they all sounded the same to me, a bird making a sound (I hesitate to say “making a noise” because someone might be offended).
Once again I put in as much effort as I could, but I had realised earlier in the year that my brain was a sponge that reached its saturation point very quickly, so the going was very slow. I still enjoyed the process of learning new things and being able to recall these later on without having to reference anything. This also meant that I stopped worrying about passing the tests and focussed a lot more on just enjoying the learning process.
This finally made all the difference.
I realised that I was here to just enjoy myself and that passing (or failing) was just a side effect of this. Not only did I have to learn how to learn again, but I had to realise that the learning was fun and being able to recall things was a skill I needed (and still need) to build. And this skill is very important in a career where learning is a constant.
