Leisa Michelle

Nerdy Monologues of an Autodidact

The Great Courses on Audible Are the Best Thing to Happen for Autodidacts

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If you’ve ever tried to teach yourself something outside of school, you’ll know it’s pretty tricky. Obviously, new things are hard to learn. It’s also hard to have the discipline to stick with your new project. But the most difficult part of all often comes before you even embark on your learning adventure: deciding which materials to use.

Let’s say you’re curious about DNA. You took a biology class or two once upon a time, but it’s been a while. The only thing you really remember is that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. So where do you start?

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Don’t Strive to Be the Best – Strive to be Better

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The power went out just now as I was publishing a new blog post. Perfect timing, right? I flopped down on the couch to decide what to do with my electricity-less, internet-less time. And I began thinking back to when I was in high school and my friend Angie and I plotted our ultimate learning project: our rise to Renaissance Man stardom. We wanted to be like Leonardo da Vinci and the other historical “masters of all trades”.

We loosely acted on our plans. We made a list of all things that a true Renaissance Man should know: classic music, biology, art history, world history, math, politics, among others. A true Renaissance Man should be one of the most capable people in the world in all these subjects, we agreed. He (or she) had to be the best. So naturally, we made being the best our goal.

We never became Renaissance Men. In fact, we failed quite miserably.

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18 Months In, 18 Months Out: An analysis of what I did before and after I dropped out of college

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I became a student at the University of Florida in August of 2013. After 18 months, I dropped out. And it’s now been 18 months since I dropped out. Because of the beautiful symmetry in time, I thought I’d analyze all the things I did while I was studying vs what I did after I quit.

So here’s all the stuff I’ve done in the past 3 years that has contributed to my personal and professional success:

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38 Books in 12 Months

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When I moved to Poland on August 30th, 2015, I decided to make a list of goals for myself. One of them was to read 15 books within the following year. It turns out that I read 38 books. That comes out to 7,942 total pages read or 209 pages per book on average.

Just… why? Why did you do this?

I dropped out of college in January 2015. Lots of factors played into my decision, but the biggest problem I had with university was that I wasn’t learning enough and I wasn’t learning what I wanted. So since dropping out of school, my education has been exclusively in my own hands. If I want to learn new things, I have to consciously set aside the time to do so. It happens that books are my favorite way of learning. Reading is awesome. I do a lot of it.

So without further ado, please enjoy the fun graphs and master list of all the books I read (with the link to the review I wrote of each book, if applicable) presented below.

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Do tests accurately measure mastery?

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This post is a part of my Personal Development Project for May 2016.

This is actually a difficult question to answer in a sharp yes or no. It depends on what kind of test is given and what the point of the test is. In this article, we’re going to talk about multiple-choice tests, fill-in-the-blank style tests, free response style tests, oral presentations, and portfolio-style projects, and see what each of these styles of testing is actually good for.

Multiple choice tests

They’re incredibly quick to grade and comparatively quick to take. Multiple choice tests make up the majority of tests that we take in formal education.

There are two main problems with multiple choice tests though. The first is that they’re easy to “crack”. You don’t have to necessarily know the answer to the question if you can recognize what isn’t the answer. The second issue is that multiple choice tests only determine whether you know a set of facts. There’s no room for interpretation or concession, all questions demand a single, clear, black and white answer.

It seems contrary to the very of purpose of education, though, that we test whether or not our students know exclusively facts. We want critical thinkers, right? We want people who ask questions and give thoughtful answers. The world is full of shades of gray that we want everyone to be able to observe and respect.

So the only thing that multiple choice tests can assess mastery of is clear, black and white facts. And yet because you can “crack” multiple choice tests, it doesn’t even do this very well.

Multiple choice tests might take a lot less time than other tests (both for the student and the teacher), but I think we can agree that they’re terrible assessments of mastery.

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