In my youth, I made many errors and mistakes in:
- physics
- mathematics
- statistics
- logic
- and many more fields
Each time it can be discouraging. This was when I was younger. As I grew older, it was the other way around, I actually looked my old mistakes differently. I knew that by making them, I was trying to learn and trying out an approach. Mistakes are critical to learning, believe it or not. Sometimes by knowing how not to do things, you understand more why the way things are written are the way they are. There are no real mistakes if you take the time to wonder more about them.
Coincidently, learning was easier when I was just relaxed and focused on what I just did rather than some letter mark or grade. A’s, B’s, C’s and high test marks are merit-able, but it didn’t help me learn better.
You see, there are patterns and tricks to learning better and if you mentally take the time to practice the patterns, you see things differently. Be mindful of one’s mistakes is what I share with you guys. It helps out! Don’t nit pick your mistakes because it might make you unable to actually fix where you are stuck. Absolutely no professional anywhere hasn’t made any. And some inventions came out of sheer chance, like radiation discovery. Still, the best way to not make them is to be relaxed. That’s why exams are 10% of your grade. I flipped everything. Those practice problems could have all been homework ones. And the more you do correctly, the more it is you actually have learned. So, an exam is rather pointless and a waste of time. Who knows? Is that practice final I made the real one? There’s always 2 of them. Make up finals too, I like that you still want to learn even after the course is over (that’s the point), and it’s just 1-2 hours of time, I have that much on a weekend. Maybe…the real final you already took on your own as study, untimed, just to see if you can do the problems. A good exercise after a midterm is to go back and make a similar problem off of the one you had and then solve it. Those problems become routine then.
Better times ahead!