I often claimed to be bad at learning languages.
Then I spent a year teaching Chinese students to speak English and I realised that these students all had one thing in common. They wanted to learn English, it mattered to them so they put in the time to learn.
You might think that you are not very good at something.
That you’ll never be able to remember Newton’s First Law of Motion in the exam.
Your brain is a mysterious organ and we don’t fully understand everything yet.
But studies have shown that the brain can be trained and you can, with practice, change your brain.
You can make it easier to remember things, such as the equation for elastic potential, if you have already strengthened your power of recall.
But you have to do something to get your brain to change.
You have to make a choice to change it. You have to make it matter.
Musicians and athletes have all put in time and patience. They often start young and they have, by choice, mastered new skills. The same is true when it comes to learning information.
(Personally, I also think your learning is very connected to your interests. I admit, this is a difficult thing to change.)
As a young child maybe you enjoyed numbers, early on you began to connect your mind in a numerical way. So you might find maths easy but art difficult.
That’s ok.
Maybe as a young child you liked letters, words. So you began to connect your mind to easily understand language, and might read well but can’t fathom numbers.
And that’s ok.
What you have been doing your whole life, is making choices as to which neural connections you are strengthening.
So why not take some time to strengthen your Science connections. A few minutes every day is all that it might take. Don’t approach it that you are going to sit and learn something. That will never work. Sit and become familiar with a topic. Be kind to yourself, you are not going to be able to do this first time you try. But that is the point. The more you try, the easier it will become.
What do you think?