I’m beginning to realize that I’m a communicator not a builder. I have ideas for products or services that I would love. Surely they would be successful, I think. I am not a programmer, therefore, it does not get built. I am, however, quite talented at finding things. And I often find previously existing realizations of my ideas - which reinforces that I should focus on finding and sharing rather than building.
While I was in school, I dreamed of a piece of software for studying. I wanted something that was quick and easy to teach material and simple to learn from. I detest regurgitation testing as much as I detest regurgitation. And this boy does not like praying to the porcelain. But rote memorization quizzing is currently an unavoidable hoop of North American “education.” I wish I had found Quizlet before I finished my degree…(s).
Quizlet is a web service that lets you create sets of quizzable knowledge in the form of digital flashcards. I have always found flashcards to be a good way for me to program my brain to remember data. (Especially data that doesn’t have immediate applicability.) This would have been great for that brutal Music History course I had to take last year.
I’m done school, but far from done lurning. I found several French-English vocabulary sets. This is another thing I dreamed about. I have such difficulty remembering the gender of French nouns. The worst part is that I second guess myself so much that I mis-correct myself as often as I get it wrong to begin with. With Quizlet, I can practice expanding my vocabulary and strengthening noun-genders.
Veronique told me that gender mistakes are the telltale sign of a non-native French speaker. If your first tongue is French, apparently you don’t make those mistakes. It’s in your blood. Or in your brain. If as long as you knew of a thing you knew it’s gender, then it couldn’t exist without it. And so to know the object is to know it’s qualifier. And because there is no system, no rhyme nor reason - each word is unique, and that’s an awful lot of tricks for this old dog to learn.
Tabarouette!
The great thing about Quizlet is that you can create your own sets and share them with other users. Classes can create study groups and share the work involved in teaching the application. I could go back and create that awesome Baroque melody counterpoint game I was dreaming of.
Ah… Baroque counterpoint… bane of my existence. I found my difficulty in that course ironic. My main previous musical experience was playing guitar, a form where I lived for parallel fifths and octaves. That sounds good to me. All of a sudden I’m supposed to hear parallel motion as evil? That took some work. I wonder if my poor professor understands why they’re so tempting. So delicious. Mmmm… I’ve got midnight hunger pangs for parallel motion. I’ll put some damn Green Day on.
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