HOW DO I STUDY FOR MY RAE

I am not ashamed to admit that I am not a smart person. I have never been a bright student in school. Te worst enemy had been books and libraries. I got bitten and knocked just because I was stupid. When I became a teacher I never knocked a student just because he was  a slow learner.  Some smart fellows in school always think they are smart forever and the rest will continue to be dumb.

Realizing my own limitation and stupidity, I need to devise a method of learning. I asked myself "If I am so stupid how come I remember thousand of words ? " So I told my students later "If you are so stupid how come you can remember thousand of things ?".   I realize that our vocabulary increases because we and hear things everyday. The role of repetition is important.

So I decide to learn thru repetition. I can't read books repeatedly. I got to make short notes. Studying for any examination at all we have to have the syllabus. In the syllabus there are topics to be  covered. The telecom gave us the syllabus and I started from it. My main reference was Basic Electronics and Basic Electricity. For every topics I read, I made sure I understood the concept and then I made a short note on the topic. To complete the whole syllabus was a painful affair. Finally it came to an end. The books were put aside.

Each day I just looked at the notes, contemplating the concepts. The method worked fine for me. It helped in in my basic and Master program as well. Repetition is akin to practice. The idiom that Practice Makes Perfect is indeed true to most of us. Those days I could dissect the whole radio theory without any pain due to the clarity in understanding.

In studying CW many of us including me did not have coach. There was no internet or personal computer to help us. Most persons bought a CW cassette from 9M2SS. I did not buy any tape but I recorded the morse codes from a radio set. I would go to areas where I could find morse signals. Ship to shore CW were all over the band. I kept on listening to these signal day in and day out until they became familiar.

I did not build any tone oscillator. I took the old transistor radio. Tapped the output and coupled it to the input via a capacitor., an audio tone was heard. Using 2 crocodile clips I practised my sending. Any character that passed my eyes at home or in town, the passing buses and lorries, were coded to morse.

Proficiency in morse was not at the time when passing the exam but after it. Each year we want to be better and better. When the computer came in I started to write a CW program using DOS. In those days Windows were not heard off. With the help of a personal computer my proficiency was enhanced.

Smart people study in different way. They learn fast in anything at all. The less smart people like most of us must study real hard, and study like the not-smart people using repetition and hard work. But we need first to instill a strong discipline in ourselves. We have to keep telling ourselves that we are not stupid. Surely at time when people are challenging us, we have to accept it and prove they are wrong.

You don't want to be called stupid forever, do you ?