I have always been passionate about both watching movies and studying subjects. However, when I was 12-13 years old, I realized that I forgot almost all the information I learned from school-program after 1-2 months, unlike the information from movies. I knew almost all the characters and incidents of movies I had seen, but no matter how much I tried, I forgot the names, inventions, and biological and physical activities. As I wondered how this was possible, we entered the biology class. Our new topic was “Memory types.”
Memory mainly has four types, which are visual, auditory, verbal, and kinesthetic memory, and we were gonna learn each of them. “I hope this lesson will be more useful and interesting than ever before because you will be able to determine your own best learning style and reinforce your retention,” said our teacher. I was like, “Eurekaaa!” I thought the solution to the problem driving me came out itself.
We learned all academic feats of memory types and went home. I was a person preferring a comprehensive response to my questions, so I decided to test myself with all those learning styles separately in no short time. One morning I read about 10 rare animals, and the next evening I recorded all the information I remembered, and so on the days went by. I spent two weeks experimenting with different learning styles and discovered that I learn best through hearing and watching. I finally found the answer to my question. However, there still was a question: So what? I contemplated and found “The collaboration” as my final choice. That was not about collaborating memory types; it was about combining my interests, strengths, and competencies into one. I love myths, psychological incidents, and many other mind-blowing events, which are my interests and competencies at the same time, so I blended them together and started to watch, learn, and enjoy. Whenever I was free, I watched plenty of TV shows about historical and fictional figures, Greek and Egyptian mythologies, how physics works, how human mind works, and etc. It turned into my secret technique to dive into the topics I was interested in. After a while, the inevitable question came again: So what? However, at this time I already had the best answer: getting rewarded.
Our librarian invited me to join her Zakovat club (Zakovat is a traditional academic competition in Uzbekistan, requiring critical thinking and a vast amount of knowledge simultaneously). I participated in several competitions with the librarian-teacher’s team and won most of them. One day when I was about to enter the class, she stopped me and asked me to organize a new Zakovat club myself for the upcoming students’ league, so I tried to make up a team that includes members from various fields and organized one. We named it “Amigos.” Suddenly, our team succeeded in a relatively short amount of time, participating at the district and regional levels 4-5 times in one academic year. We got a pretty high reputation among schoolmates and planned to inspire the youth to explore the intellectual world of Zakovat. We arranged tournaments between students’ teams in school, trying to establish a sense of teamwork, responsibility, and resilience among them, which are the main skills to overcome challenges and some of the most lacking skills of today’s people as well. Because we were high-schoolers, we also made a decision about showing the privilege of intelligence to young students: we brought them to tournaments to think with us as a player and face the intense environment while finding the best-suited answers to the given questions.Despite some students’ ignorance to our efforts, we didn’t stop and won’t stop encouraging youth to put their academic excellence into the practical field, whereas having an ability to practice academic knowledge is undoubtedly essential especially for the youth.
While recalling all these memories, I remembered the words of Dr. Dryden from “Lawrence of Arabia” to General, “Big Things Have Small Beginnings.” As Amigos helped over twenty students to make their own teams and develop as an intelligent person, it all began just from one’s questioning himself “Why don’t I remember information from the school-program as well as I do from movies?”