I wrote the third of 5 Real Estate exams at the end of last year. This one was the culmination of 3 weeks of in class study of the real estate transaction. It’s hard to believe you could find 2 large textbooks and all the associated workbooks full of technical detail to talk about but there it is. It was an intense and full 3 weeks. And one of things I am discovering along this road is that I don’t absorb new stuff like I used to. I think as we get older we just develop a thicker skull and it takes more effort for stuff to sink in. I have had to figure out how to study again.
There is process to learning and we don’t all learn in the same way. I have found over the years that learning something new is not about memorizing the individual parts of a thing. For me it is more like soaking in something and having the big picture slowly (more slowly now than ever) but surely start to come into focus. I think that may be because I have never been particularly good with detail. I need to know how it all works together in order to be satisfied that I have learned it. I really wish I could have discovered this way of learning when I was in high school. HIgh school was a brutally frustrating experience, a significant contributor to my decision to go to work rather than go on to university.
Another thing I’ve had to learn as I continue along my retirement journey is to be a little more gracious over against myself. I arrived in class the first Monday of this latest real estate course expecting to be handed my books and course material. I asked the instructor where they were and she advised me that they should have arrived at my house. I asked Debbie about it and she said “there’s a box of stuff in office closet that I’ve been wondering about”. Turns out the box arrived this summer while we were in Europe. I remember seeing it within the first few hours of arriving at home and thinking “I’m gonna have to get to that”. It was put into a pile of stuff that ended up in the closet and I never thought about it again. The bottom line was that everyone in the class had already been through the books once and I was behind the 8 ball. So the first week was a scramble to catch up and a period of beating myself up for not being on top of it. After all, I’m retired, what else do I have to do?
I did get through it, passed the exam which required a mark of 75%, and even managed to squeeze in a SCUBA course on one of the weekends. That was a whole other story. This time I was learning a whole bunch of new stuff with a group of 20-somethings watching every failed attempt. Again, a little bit more grace would have gone a long way to making that easier.