Learning

I've never really taken notes. In mathematics, for instance, I never wrote down theorems or rules in a notebook. Instead, I would dive straight into the textbook's practice problems. If I encountered something unfamiliar, I'd refer to an example in the book and then immediately try to apply it. This method of learning by doing helped me internalize concepts far more effectively than simply writing them down ever could.

Even in subjects like biology, which often require ridiculous amounts of rote memorization, I found that answering questions and applying concepts was far more beneficial than traditional note-taking. It wasn't the act of writing that helped me remember or understand; it was the process of engaging with the material through practical applications.

Overall, I found it much more effective to simply focus in class and listen to what the teacher is saying instead of constantly writing stuff down, however I do have pretty good memory, so this might not suit other people as well.

The Challenge of Self-Directed Learning

While this approach has been successful in structured academic environments, I'm now grappling with how to apply it to self-directed learning, particularly in areas that don't have clear-cut exercises or tests. For example, how do I learn about something like the JavaScript event loop? It's a cool thing I'd like to learn, but it's not something you'd typically find practice problems for in a textbook.

Learning programming has always been from building projects for me, but that doesn't reach into the deeper workings of how it works, and only exposes the surface. It also has the effect of generating deep spikes of knowledge in one aspect of a field. I guess one of the main problem is exercises that reach deep and encompass some complex topic are hard to come by. I have a deep interest in learning how things work, but yet it's so hard to quantify how much you know.

I suppose I could always watch a video or read some documentation, but it's really diffcult to practice for something that abstract and rarely tested.

So my questions remains, how do you learn something that's not going to be tested?

And I'm also not even in university yet, so there's lots to learn about how I actually learn stuff.