Confessions of a Self-Directed Learner

Diagnosis by Comparison

• Author: Did you find out about self-directed learning and think, Ooh! That's me!?

• Learner: I've never been consciously trying to do it. I took the bull by the horns. It wasn’t something I realized in one day. It was a process. Okay, I tend to do things my own way. Then one day I thought, I do things my own way, by myself. Then also I thought, I tend to think by myself.

• Author: Are you more self-directed than others?

• Learner: Yeah. By looking at my peers and students that I've had, I consider it much stronger than the average person, a much stronger instinct. Perhaps it's only an instinct, but I think I embody self-directed learning much more than the average person.

The first time I did self-directed learning was when I read about physics and string theory. I kept reading about it, and I thought, Well, I’ve got to learn math. I had failed algebra that past semester, because I didn't do any of it, but then the next semester, I went to the library, got a book, and taught myself algebra. I had read the book, and my math story did a complete 180. I then taught myself calculus in high school. That was when the trend started.

• Author: Was this different from your peers’ learning experiences?

• Learner: None of my friends would’ve done what I did. After I learned calculus, I wanted to jump into theoretical physics. Since right before I was 13, that's all I could think about. I would learn something so I could learn something else. Before my senior year in high school, I bought a tensor calculus book and Schaum’s Outlines for calculus III. I watched Leonard Susskind’s lectures on general relativity. By the end of my senior year, I could derive the Reimann tensor or the geodesic equation. Nobody else would do that because they wouldn't care.