I started Medical Transcription Editing through Career Step four days ago. Anyone who has read this knows by now, I was waiting and waiting and waiting. Of course, three months doesn't seem that long to most people. To me it felt like forever.
I finally got the okay from Barb and Jerry and vocational rehabilitation on Thursday morning. Shortly after that Career Step enrollment contacted me and we set up their registration. One short hour later, my login was accepted and I was online as an honest-to-goodness student.
The course is very detailed and it is set up to give the student as many opportunities to go through the information in different ways and forms. Like one section will have a typing game and another will have a crossword, all covering the same information. Only a few pages into the lesson and exercises, reviews, and exams start showing up.
What is really nice is that this is go-at-your-own pace. The course is laid out in such a way that you may repeat anything as many times as you need to in order to understand it.
I started through the first two "modules" without taking notes or doing anything more than just reading the information. When the exercises and reviews showed up a few pages into it, I had a lot of the answers correct, but not all. My goal is to have 100% on every exercise, review, and test in the course. (I was always aiming for that 4.0 GPA in high school too!) I went back and reviewed the pages relating to the exercise and took it again. In some cases I had to take it three times to get the grade I wanted.
All this reviewing and retaking was not a bad thing. I did cement the information more firmly into my memory; however I didn't feel very good about my ability to retain anything after the first two times and having incorrect answers.
I decided I would change my approach. I started taking notes and making a glossary type word list. I began this note taking with a minimalist approach. Guess what. I was still getting some of my answers back as incorrect. So, that wasn't working. Then I turned to the write everything that looks like it might be relevant approach. Better, much better, but still not right.
It then occurred to me that I have access to the questions before I read the information, just like in a textbook in high school. Well, duh. If I know what the questions are then I know what they consider important or relevant information during my reading. I've only done a couple of the exercises with this method in mind and so far it is working great.
Now, all this writing is making my wrist twinge. Isn't this about typing?
