I am in high school (Italy), and i have always had serious issues with studying. I literally cannot focus into anything for more than 5 minutes or so, before my vision gets blurry and i just stop understanding what i read. And because Italian schools decided to be unique, i need to study subjects i have no interest in, like physics or latin, which are basically impossible to get into my head. I tried many methods, namely: taking regular breaks, going somewhere without any technology, studying with friends, watching videos, listening to music; but it never worked out, i’d always just drop the topics I’m studying, and i’m kinda jealous of those who study 30 minutes and get the best grades, because i can never get to what they know even in infinite time. What can i try?

  • eskimofry@lemmy.world
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    10 hours ago

    I had this problem too. When I was young the subjects I had on a particular year were… distasteful for the version of me in that year. But now in my 30s I figured out that it was because of misalignment in interest based on my age.

    Tl; Dr -

    1. Top-Down approach - skim through the text at a brisk pace and capture the high level themes of each section/paragraph. Then drill down deeper for the second time. Repeat until you are familiar with the topic.
    2. Change perspectives - Imagine you are the person solving a problem in history when some problem/event happened. Works well to pur yourself in somebody else’s shoes. Especially useful “unlearning” a lot of things we take for granted in the modern age.
    3. Try to study a subject from multiple sources: Lecture videos from other schools, different professors, different books, summaries from AI.

    The main problem is the material needs to be presented to you in a way that aligns with your thought process and frame of mind at a specific point in time.

    Expecting a young person to change perspective is very hard: They have a hard time having ONE consistent perspective… let alone multiple based on the subject at hand. However it’s too important to suggest alternatives.

    Let’s take physics. Try to understand at a high level what the problem statement is and why people invented the math to understand the physical phenomenon they were trying to understand and describe.

    Latin: Generally for language it’s important to practice speaking and listening to get familiar quickly. Unfortunately for languages like this which is not spoken widely nowadays you have to rely on reading history and associate the language to it somehow.

    • curious_beetle@lemmy.mlOP
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      9 hours ago

      Thanks, i’ll try that. Except for latin since we don’t study it as a language, but rather we learn grammar rules and that’s it, plus various writers and intellectuals from the roman era, which is annoying lol

      • eskimofry@lemmy.world
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        6 hours ago

        does your school hate its students? Just grammatical rules? 😅 At least the writers and intellectuals you can somewhat study their lives independently of the curriculum