I just passed the professional certification exam required by my employer. It was my first exam since graduating, so, I won’t lie, I panicked a little because I was already out of practice, and the countdown clock in the corner of the exam application window didn’t help.
To be honest, I don’t like this type of exam where all that counts is the ability to memorise facts. I’ve never been good at this. I remember back in primary school, we had to memorise certain poems and recite them in front of the class for grades, and it was an absolute nightmare—not the recitation part but the memorization.
I learn best by gaining an understanding of the laws governing a given phenomenon, etc. In college, we had a chemical technology course where part of the curriculum was learning diagrams of chemical installations, such as oil refining, the production of nitrogen fertilisers, or certain acids. They were fairly complex, and I noticed students were divided into two groups: those who memorised a bunch of geometric shapes connected by lines, and those who learned the actual process shown in the diagram.
It’s not rocket science to guess who was better off. If someone from the first group was called to the blackboard to draw a diagram and they forgot any of the elements or confused the lines connecting them, they had no way to fix it because they had no idea what they were drawing. In contrast, if someone from the second group made a mistake while drawing, it all came down to following the process, and it quickly turned out that, for example, there was a pump missing between the tank and the furnace that heats the crude oil before it was fed to the distillation column.
And I guess it’s the same with life, where memorising the map is pointless if you don’t have a sense of direction.
hidden pilcrow 