Hacking my learning

I had to hack my learning. Over the past few weeks, I found that I wasn’t picking up JavaScript as well as I’d like with fCC. I got bored with tutorials and I figured out a pattern to solving problems by imitation rather then thinking through it. I am naturally a corner cutter and so without the fundamental understanding I flew through the material with patterns I picked up solving the easy stuff. For me to understand something I have to dig into what’s under the hood.

In addition to fCC, I tried Codecademy, reading JavaScript books, looking at MDN and other online resources. Some stuff was boring and other stuff was incredibly dense.

I recently had an ‘aha’ moment when my RC start mentor walked me through building a JavaScript image slider using Codepen and screen-casting. As she built the slider, I listened to her talk her way through why she did things. I am comfortable with JavaScript syntax but I usually get caught up in thinking computationally. It helped so much to hear her talk through her process.

So now I am beginning to understand what’s most important to my learning. I need a fundamental understanding of concepts and I need interactive examples.

I think the right amount of community and self awareness pertaining to one’s learning style can save a ton of time and trouble learning.