Elementary school
For whatever reason, the memory that came to mind for this time period was learning to write in cursive. Like most children, I hated it and couldn’t see the point. When asked why we had to learn it, my teacher’s best justification was that when you write a check as an adult, you have to write out the amount in cursive. As a small child this was not a particularly motivating reason. As an adult, I get a tiny ball of anxiety whenever I write a check that my check is somehow invalid because I write it out in legible, regular printed handwriting. Funnily enough, nobody has ever refused to take my money because the check wasn’t filled out in cursive. So.. Still not sure why we had to learn cursive. We had a specific class period for cursive writing where we learned new letters and had to practice our cursive writing on worksheets, first tracing printed examples and then freehand writing. The teacher’s first tip was to turn the paper at an angle to help tilt our letters properly, which just had me tilting my head and body along with the paper. For those of us who struggled to get the loops long enough and our lines of writing straight across the page, we were told to put a lined piece of paper underneath the worksheet, which just felt like cheating somehow. Overall, the closest I’ve ever come to wanting to know cursive has been toying with the idea of getting into calligraphy as a hobby. Even then, the style and shapes of the letters are personal and variable, so I still really won’t use it.
College
I remember in college learning how to read a scientific paper, a skill absolutely critical to a research scientist, which I wanted to become. I first encountered this skill in a graduate level microbiology course and was utterly incapable of parsing a scientific paper to identify the important components. I met with the teaching assistant for the course in office hours to try to figure it out, but they really weren’t able to explain it to me in a way I understood. The next semester I took a literature review course that consisted entirely of reading historical manuscripts to follow particular fields of research and critical scientific discoveries. That course was a huge help because it gave more practice and involved group discussion of the papers with input from the instructor and other students. In addition, the style of writing used in historical manuscripts was FAR more accessible than in modern publications. Following science through history gave me a chance to see the evolution of manuscript writing to appreciate what is important and how it is presented. However, the point where I really, finally felt like I had a handle on reading a manuscript was the term afterwards, where I had a 1-1 guided reading “course” with the same instructor as the literature review course. In the guided reading, the instructor presented me with a selected modern manuscript related to her specific field of research and I read & analyzed them from the perspective of someone in the field who wanted to understand every detail of the experimental design, methodology, and findings.
Professional
When I started my current position as a curriculum development specialist, I had to learn how to use several instructional technologies, in particular the university’s learning management system (LMS). I didn’t have a formal teacher or much guidance in this learning, since I joined a very small team at the height of the pandemic-induced switch to online teaching in Fall 2020. I learned most of the content by navigating through existing asynchronous training resources, then practicing those skills and exploring features in a practice course in the LMS. I did learn from my teammates in training seminars they presented for faculty and other staff, which imparted a sense of order and approach to course setup that helps troubleshoot issues for providing technical support. Finally, I also shadowed my teammates in technical support consults to learn how to really troubleshoot LMS issues.
For whatever reason, the memory that came to mind for this time period was learning to write in cursive. Like most children, I hated it and couldn’t see the point. When asked why we had to learn it, my teacher’s best justification was that when you write a check as an adult, you have to write out the amount in cursive. As a small child this was not a particularly motivating reason. As an adult, I get a tiny ball of anxiety whenever I write a check that my check is somehow invalid because I write it out in legible, regular printed handwriting. Funnily enough, nobody has ever refused to take my money because the check wasn’t filled out in cursive. So.. Still not sure why we had to learn cursive. We had a specific class period for cursive writing where we learned new letters and had to practice our cursive writing on worksheets, first tracing printed examples and then freehand writing. The teacher’s first tip was to turn the paper at an angle to help tilt our letters properly, which just had me tilting my head and body along with the paper. For those of us who struggled to get the loops long enough and our lines of writing straight across the page, we were told to put a lined piece of paper underneath the worksheet, which just felt like cheating somehow. Overall, the closest I’ve ever come to wanting to know cursive has been toying with the idea of getting into calligraphy as a hobby. Even then, the style and shapes of the letters are personal and variable, so I still really won’t use it.
College
I remember in college learning how to read a scientific paper, a skill absolutely critical to a research scientist, which I wanted to become. I first encountered this skill in a graduate level microbiology course and was utterly incapable of parsing a scientific paper to identify the important components. I met with the teaching assistant for the course in office hours to try to figure it out, but they really weren’t able to explain it to me in a way I understood. The next semester I took a literature review course that consisted entirely of reading historical manuscripts to follow particular fields of research and critical scientific discoveries. That course was a huge help because it gave more practice and involved group discussion of the papers with input from the instructor and other students. In addition, the style of writing used in historical manuscripts was FAR more accessible than in modern publications. Following science through history gave me a chance to see the evolution of manuscript writing to appreciate what is important and how it is presented. However, the point where I really, finally felt like I had a handle on reading a manuscript was the term afterwards, where I had a 1-1 guided reading “course” with the same instructor as the literature review course. In the guided reading, the instructor presented me with a selected modern manuscript related to her specific field of research and I read & analyzed them from the perspective of someone in the field who wanted to understand every detail of the experimental design, methodology, and findings.
Professional
When I started my current position as a curriculum development specialist, I had to learn how to use several instructional technologies, in particular the university’s learning management system (LMS). I didn’t have a formal teacher or much guidance in this learning, since I joined a very small team at the height of the pandemic-induced switch to online teaching in Fall 2020. I learned most of the content by navigating through existing asynchronous training resources, then practicing those skills and exploring features in a practice course in the LMS. I did learn from my teammates in training seminars they presented for faculty and other staff, which imparted a sense of order and approach to course setup that helps troubleshoot issues for providing technical support. Finally, I also shadowed my teammates in technical support consults to learn how to really troubleshoot LMS issues.