Begin your nursing education by taking control of your learning. Realize that what you get from your professors (lectures, reading assignments, PowerPoint presentations) is not learning. What you get are the elements of learning, not the end-all of learning.
Real learning is that really cool thing that can be made from these elements. You have to take control of these elements. They exist like shoelaces do. If we don’t tie them together, well, then our shoes fall off when it’s time to run. Much the way elements on the Periodic Table get combined to make other more wonderful things (you know, we get salty French fries because sodium is combined with chloride), lecture notes, reading assignments, and PowerPoints need to be combined to make sense.
Perhaps a triangle would be useful.
Picture a triangle with each of its points represented as Reading, Lecture Notes, and PowerPoints. Don’t think of them as isolated things to study. Think of them as part of one thing. Study them together.
Begin your nursing education by combining these three elements into new matter. Let’s call that new matter learning. Not someone else’s learning. Not your professors’. But yours. So make it yours. Make it make sense for you. Here are a few suggestions for working the triangle: Rewrite lecture notes while reading. Put notes from your reading into lecture notes. Take information from the PowerPoints and write it in your textbook. A really old dude (that’d be Aristotle) said that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” Put another way, focus on the whole and the sum of learning will be greater.
Carry on.