Funny Side (Hopefully) Up

I don't know if you know this, but I love to cook. Like, love to the point where I'm not allowed in the kitchen during exam season because it's too distracting. I suspect that it's got something to do with the fact that I love to eat, and if you want to eat food that you like, it tends to help if you know how to make it. The real challenge with cooking isn't really the actual cooking - that's the easy part. No, the hard part is finding something to cook. The problem is that I have a device with internet access, and that means I have access to a virtually infinite recipe pool with recipes of widely varying quality. My solution to all this is to find people - YouTube chefs, Taste.com writers - whose recipes tend to turn out well. Of all the recipes I've pulled off the internet, though, my favourite has to be this one seriously excessive bruschetta recipe from Gennaro Contaldo. Generic bruschetta for copyright reasons The recipe is from a video on You...

As anyone currently in the twelfth will tell you, with varying levels of dismay, the final exams are right around the corner. Parents everywhere are seizing their children's phones and taking time off from work. Panicked screaming ensues at intervals. I don't believe there's a person on the planet who genuinely enjoys exam season. Actually, I take that back - there's no one in India  who enjoys exam season. Partially, I think this is our own fault. Exams are the most important things in an Indian student's life, so parents seem bent on bottling up all the worry and concern they have about their kid's education and allowing it to spew forth in a torrent of "No more video games!" and "Delete WhatsApp!" commands during the two months surrounding the exams. Small wonder, then, that at 17, I believe the purpose of exams is to seasonally blot the sunshine from otherwise happy lives. This whole exam fever thing does have some upsides. Okay, ...

There's an interesting concept that's gotten a lot of traction over the past couple of years called "meta learning".  It's a term coined by one Donald B. Maudsley, who defined it as "the process by which learners become aware of and increasingly in control of habits of perception, inquiry, learning, and growth that they have internalized". Translated from Sciencese, Maudsley is talking about how we figure out ways to become more efficient at learning new information. HR managers (you know, those overpaid dimwits you complain to about your coworker stealing your lunch?) like to call it "learnability". Most people with real jobs don't call it anything at all. In reality, though, it's an extremely useful thing to understand, together with the techniques you would use to get good at it. Myself, I'm a decent-ish learner. Mostly, that's because I've had to learn things on my own quite often - I had to teach myself web design, ...