How do I learn?

Everybody learns things differently. Some are visual learners, some rote and some learn by doing. Although I did improve in my study and learning technique over my uni years I am still at a loss as to how to learn effectively and as the years go by I find my attention span shortening no matter the motivation for study.

My suggestion would be to try different methods for learning; remove distractions and find your motivation for learning. Question the reasons why you want to learn and what you wish to achieve from further study. For me, big distractions are environment and technology. Finding a quiet place and playing easy music reduce distractions and going back to the humble handwriting is good for technological distractions. Transferring this to a forum like this blog has been good in consolidating knowledge and sieving the knowledge through the act of reading, writing and typing has worked to consolidate the knowledge. I will explore this method further and see if it works long term for me. Unfortunately that means that there will be a lot more tediously written and comprehensive blog posts but these can be useful in themselves.

I do feel that it is good to have a place to put own thoughts about theory and practice such as this blog. A lot of dental practice is mindless and muscle memory and we can go through much of the day repeating our comfortable scripts to the patient and completing our mindless dentistry however this does act as a barrier for developing of techniques. If we are always doing the same work how can it improve? In a sense it can be a more efficient workflow with less redos and corrections but we must be constantly striving to trying new techniques and expanding our knowledge. It is good to question everything we are doing with "is this right?" and "how can this be better?"

Here's to becoming better.