At the beginning of any education process, I turn into a total keener. I study, I prepare, I read, I do everything right. The hard part, of course, is keeping that up. But I’m setting goals for myself early and reminding myself of the pancake philosophy I read on jhawke’s website, originally from this site (which has a terribly amusing video about it.) Go read it, or the rest of this post may seem odd as I keep referring to pancakes.
Now, I’m in no way comparing a three week EMR course to med school. But the principle applies to a lot of different things, so I’m stealing it for my own use. Especially since once the shiny newness rubs off, I tend to get a bit lazy about things like oh, say, studying. So, I must remember to eat my pancakes, lest I wake up the day before my course starts and have 28 chapters to go through in one night.
My pancakes, from now until my course starts, are to go through two chapters a night. Read chapters, possibly twice. Then go through all of the goals at the beginning of each chapter, and answer all of the review questions at the end.
I did my first two chapters tonight, and I’m proud of myself. I took four pages of notes. Although chapter two was ridiculously easy — c’mon, how to avoid infectious disease? How long have I been involved in the kink community? And really, the five stages of grieving? Both House AND Scrubs have had an episode about that. I’m practically an expert!
Yum! Now I want pancakes… Good luck with that.