After homework, extra curricular activities, social life and leisure, you may have little time to do anything else. But have you ever made an effort to learn about something outside the classroom, not related to anything you’re studying in school? How would you use a daily “learning hour”?
In the
Education Life article “Renaissance Man,” Diana Kapp writes about Jeremy
Gleick, a University of California, Los Angeles sopho more who takes an hour a
day to learn something new — every day, no exceptions. Mr. Gleick’s main rule
is that the subject matter can’t have anything to do with his school work. To
date, he has spent more than 1,000 hours on his project:
It all began
junior year at Berkeley High with the philosophizing that came with the run-up
to college applications. “I was spending a lot of time asking, ‘Why are we
here, and to what end?’” Mr. Gleick says. He concluded that learning was what
mattered most. He sat down and watched a documentary on gamma ray bursts. A few
days later, he did some reading on transhumanism, and then spent an hour two
days in a row trying to become ambidextrous. After a month straight, he misseda
day, which some how felt off. Since then he’s kept up a perfect streak.
The topics,
neatly logged on an enormous spread sheet, organized by category and
subcategories, jump from left brain to right, through civilizations, from
astrophysics and alchemy to the Zulu. His chart tally reveals he has spent a
total of 17 hours on art history, 39 on the Civil War period and 14 onweaponry.
On the lighter side, he has tackled juggling,
glass blowing, banjo and mandolin.
Most material
he finds, for free, on iTunes U, including full courses from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and Stanford lasting 20 to 30 days, though he doesn’t
always do them consecutively. He often has no topic in mind, and trips over
something on the home page. For how-to learning (card tricks, juggling), his
go-to site is YouTube. He has used Internet Sacred Text Archive to source
myths, and Fora for conference lectures on the Hubble Space Telescope and
psychology of lying.
Students: Tell
us about a time when you learned something not related to your studies in
school. How did the experience compare with learning in the classroom? How
would you use an hour a day to expand your horizons? What would you tackle, and
why? Might you under take a self-directed learning project like this? Why or why not?
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