cross-posted from: https://linux.community/post/2267705
I’m a nurse thinking about expanding my job options and knowledge, maybe studying something. I don’t want to work bedside till I’m old enough to cash in my 401k because then I’ll have a broken back and I don’t want to become one of those old angry nurses constantly on edge because she’s angry at life.
To me, the way to achieve this is to learn a lot of things systematically: medicines (not the brand names, but the active components, because doctors where I work use components extensively), diagnoses that are often abbreviated, right anatomical names for bones, muscles and blood vessels…, right ranges for arterial and venous blood gas parameters and clinical chemistry…
It’s tedious and repetitive and I don’t want to take any drugs to study better, but I believe it fits me because I was always an introverted bookworm.
Is there any better way to learn this than the way I just described? It means 3 hours of reading and repeating concepts and ranges after my shift.
Memoization cards! Good for driving snippets of information through short-term memory, medium-term, and into long-term.
Cut up cardboard pieces roughly credit card sized.
On each write a cue on one side e.g. “Anatomical name of funny bone”, and answer on other side e.g. “ulnar nerve”.
Keep them in stacks of “hourly”, “daily”, “weekly”, “monthly”.
Every hour, go through the hourly pile one by one and try to answer it, then flip and check. If correct, move to daily pile.
Every day, go through daily pile. Correct go to “weekly”, incorrect go back to “hourly”.
Etc for the other piles
So like… AnkiDroid
Ankidroid is the best memory cards app for sure!
Yup, flashcards and spaced repitition are pretty well evidenced for memorisation. I’m also a fan of mind maps, but that’s more for linking ideas and concepts together, not just learning acronyms, but mixing the two works well.
There are other memorisation techniques that you might find helpful depending on how keen you are (visualisation, methods of loci, etc) but for most people they feel like to much trouble to learn. Creating mnemonics and associating stupid images and stuff with otherwise arbitary acronyms can help. I can still remember all my physics equations from high-school QIT PIV etc because of stupid nonsense phrases I associated with them.
This is the way. I just bought a study guide for a test prep and it came with flash cards and instructions to separate them by daily (don’t know) and 3x/wk (kinda know). Choose something you like to do- watch a show, have a snack, browse social media, etc., and do the cards before you do the things.