If I have a special talent, it is that I am very good at learning a lot of things quickly. This isn’t the same thing as being a fast learner; I’m not a fast learner. If something doesn’t click the first time I’m exposed to it, there’s a very good chance it’s going to take me a long time to wrap my head around it. I suppose that makes me lucky, then, that most things tend to click. My real talent is being able to work with lots of information in a format where everything is new, and rapidly put together connected pieces in order to deduce the underlying patterns.
I realized I had this talent in High School, where it served the purpose of helping me bluff my way through classes in which I had no business participating. Most egregiously, in English class, where my class participation counted for a disproportionate percentage of my grade, and my chronic illnesses meant I frequently arrived back just as the class had finished reading a book of which I hadn’t received a copy. On many occasions, I would earn points by building off or reflecting upon points raised by other students. On two occasions, I wrote essays about books I had never held, much less read. I got A’s on both essays, and never scored below an 87% (which was only ever so low because the teacher counted two missed exams as zeros rather than allowing me to retake them) in English as a whole.
Some friends of mine have called this cheating. I disagree. I never claimed that I read the books in question. On the contrary, on the occasions that I mentioned the fact that I had never received a copy to my teachers, I was told simply to try my best to keep up with the class in the meantime while they tracked down an extra copy. So the teachers were aware, or should have been aware, that I was talking off the cuff. I never consulted some other source, like sparknotes, that wretched hive of plagiarist scoundrels and academic villainy.
In any case, I have found this talent to be most useful when diving into a new area. I may not be able to become an expert faster than anyone else, but I can usually string enough information together to sound like I know that of which I speak, and ensure that my questions are insightful and topical, befitting an enlightened discussion, rather than shallow and obvious questions betraying a fresh initiate to the field. This means that I am, perhaps ironically, best in my element when I am furthest behind. I learn more faster by throwing myself into the deep end of something I know nothing about, than reviewing stuff I mostly know.
Secretly, I suspect this is actually not a unique talent. I think most, or at least, many people, learn effectively this way. But whether through a school system designed on a model intended more to promote martial regimentation than intellectual striving, or a culture that punishes failure far more sharply than it incentivizes the entrepreneurial experimentation necessary for personal academic success, we have taught ourselves to avoid this kind of behavior. But whether this talent is mine alone, or I have merely been the first to recognize that the emperor has, in fact, no clothes, this places me in a unique situation.
The problem comes when called upon to follow up on initial successes. Usually this is, in practice, a moot point, because this is precisely where I get sick, miss class, and wind up behind again, where I can capitalize on my skill set and come rocketing back in the nick of time. But this year, with a few exceptions, I have been healthy, or at least, healthy enough to keep up. It turns out that when you follow a course at the intended pace of one week per week, instead of missing months in a febrile delirium and frantically tearing through the textbook in the space of a frantic fortnight, things are, for the most part, manageable.
This is a novel, if not inherently difficult, problem for me- learning at an ordinary pace, instead of a crash course. It’s the informational difference between a week long car trip and an overnight flight. You’d think that learning in such an environment, with one new thing among eleven things I already know, would be easier than taking in twelve new things. But I find that this isn’t necessarily true. I’m good at taking in information,but rubbish at prioritizing information.
