The Importance Of Shortcuts

I love to learn new things. From learning skills like violin and tennis to learning new concepts in school like the tectonic plates in Geography, I try my best to master everything I set out to learn. The mentality to constantly strive for the best results shaped the ways I learned various things. I am resilient when faced with obstacles during the process of learning different skills and topics, but I do sometimes take shortcuts to achieve perfection. These shortcuts often come in the form of temporary learning where I resort to route learning and skip the process of understanding the concept to achieve my goals. Shortcuts are definitely not the best solution to learning something, but it is an effective way for me to achieve my goals the …show more content…
I used a resistance band on a daily basis to strengthen the arch, and I practice pointing my toes whenever I had free time. I could have given up and taken up another genre of dance but I wanted to see how far I could push myself for ballet. It did take several years to achieve the arch I so desired, but I finally succeeded and could continue to learn ballet. Giving up on ballet would be the same as not reading the ending of a book, I would not have known if I could have made it to the end and finished the eighth grade of ballet. The fact that I tried and conquered the obstacle that was my flat feet gave me a confidence boost that I could achieve things if I set my mind to completing …show more content…
I learned this the hard way during my Grade 6 piano exam, where I forgot one of my piano pieces in the middle of playing it. Most people would sight-read their pieces, but sight-reading skills left little to be desired, so I had always memorized my piano pieces from the first grade. I did make an effort to improve my sigh-reading skills but I was not confident enough to rely on them for an exam. Hence, I made the safe choice to memorize my pieces. I could only remember the parts that had crescendos and accelerando for a short amount of time because I didn’t take the time to understand the significance of each term, which meant that I had to look through the pieces every few months to memorize them again as it was not part of my long-term memory. As a result, I forgot the last two pages of one of my piece while playing it during my exam. I was absolutely devastated, but it was definitely a wake-up call for me to realize that temporary learning was not the best learning method to retain information. When pressed for time it does work as a way to retain as much information as possible, but it does not allow you to maximize your potential for