Independent Learning

The final in my Spanish class is tomorrow evening. I’ve put in a few hours studying both yesterday and today. I definitely know a lot more Spanish than when I began, but it’s a slow process, learning a language. I plan to take the next two semesters of Spanish as well, but the next class doesn’t begin until fall (end of August, actually).

It’s been interesting to get back into the habit of studying. Back in grad school, ages ago, we were encouraged to get done with our coursework fairly quickly, so it’s probably been ten years since I’ve had a final exam. And grad school coursework was always very focused on providing background skills for research. General study wasn’t part of the picture.

My independent studies these days include Spanish and statistics. I’ve started working through a somewhat mathematical (translation: a bit hard for me, but hopefully not too) new text on statistics (All of Statistics: A Concise Course in Statistical Inference, by Larry Wasserman) that starts with basics of probability and ends reaching some quite recently developed techniques. It will take me a few months to work through the book. But as with learning Spanish, I appreciate that many studies simply take a long time, and the best approach is to keep plugging away.