Since my freshman year of college, I have struggled with studying. I didn’t learn how to study in high school because I didn’t have to. I was one of the “smart kids”, who got good grades, not because she studied all the time, but because she always did her work well. It didn’t help that the administration at my high school separated each grade level into 3 classes based largely on academic performance. There was never an emphasis on consistent studying. You had to make sure you got it right the first time around.
At the university level, you are expected to know how to study. There are no classes that teach you how to study, which is something that I think would be very beneficial, especially for FGLI students like me. I took a test in my Latin class and studying for it was really hard for me to do even though I knew what was going to be covered on the test. I didn’t know how to prepare, so I relied on my ability to retain information which inevitably caused me to forget the grammar structure that was on the test. Knowing how to effectively study would have helped me fill in that gap so that I wouldn’t have to panic or feel insecure about the test afterwards.
I don’t even know or understand what studying actually means. Is it sitting down and reading over your notes over and over again? Is it memorizing certain subject areas? Is it a combination of the two? I don’t know and maybe I will never actually know how to study. It seems to be easier for everyone around me because they just sit down and get right to it. Since freshman year, it feels like I have been bombarded with having to do this skill that I simply cannot and now it feels like it’s too late to even ask. I hope that someday studying will get easier for me, but I know that today is most certainly not the day.
