Posts

Why I got lost - a personal history of navigation errors

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Another post about mountaineering, but this time I'm admitting some failures: times where I became what is sometimes referred to as "navigationally challenged".  This is a phrase used by mapreading types to avoid saying that they're lost. 'Lost' is a word that's bleak in an outdoor context. Lost is the thing where you can't work out which side of the map you should be looking at. Lost is when you realise you haven't been paying attention for an hour. In a mountaineering context, lost is when people call Mountain Rescue to get them off the hill. And it's ok to call MR for help - that's what they're for. But in the UK at least, they're volunteers and I don't want to use them if I don't need to. An unexpected injury or medical emergency can happen to anyone - but having to navigate is not unexpected. If you're going out to the mountains, you will have to navigate. Do it enough, and you'll navigate wrong. The important t
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How to defeat the forgetting curve - a practical guide to revising for your exams

In total, I spent something like 18 years in formal education. That's a lot of time, and over those years, I learned many things, working all the way up from the alphabet to writing a master's thesis. One thing that I don't exactly remember being taught is how to organise one's work effectively. Certainly, there were versions of this along the way: being given a homework planner at secondary, and project management lectures at university - but these never quite laid out a system for organisation, and especially revision, that stuck with me. In various 'how to revise' sessions at secondary school. Invariably, these involved some external speaker (presumably charging cash-strapped schools a healthy fee for the privilege) where they showed you this diagram: image/svg+xml
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