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Long lists of foreign words that we were expected to learn overnight for the next day's test, or historical names and dates, geographical areas, maths formulas and all other forms of facts and figures.
For some people, these tasks are easy, but for the majority of us it was our major stumbling block and made school life a misery because we felt foolish.
What's more, as parents we're perpetuating this in our children by making them learn their lists and homework.
Ring any bells? This is not to say that children shouldn't do their homework, far from it, but with the marvels of computer and internet technology comes a multitude of learning options.
Just a word into any search engine will bring hundreds, if not thousands, of pages that offer different solutions or opportunities to learn more about any topic.
Too many in fact, because we often spend so much time 'surfing' around these sites that we stray from the original subject even though the dozens of other sites we've visited are really interesting and often useful.
So the problem seems to be finding really useful and pertinent sites that will help us with our own learning, and the learning that our children are doing right now for their schoolwork, exams, university courses etc as I'm sure you'll agree.
Sometimes this happens completely randomly and for me, this is how it happened.
After 5 years studying with the Open University for my Degree I decided to study Spanish as a second language.
Whilst jumping from site to site for vocabulary, grammar, cultural and political insights into the country, I 'happened' upon a site called Quizlet.
com developed by a teenage entrepreneur called Andrew Sutherland, and was bowled over by the ease and simplicity of registering as a member and setting up a study set.
Literally within minutes and, best of all, it's completely FREE! Since discovering this marvellous tool, I have created dozens of sets and use them to share with study pals but, if you don't want to create your own sets there are literally hundreds already created by other members for a wide range of subjects.
Best of all with this simple program is that it's FUN - one list of words will take only a few minutes to create (literally a few minutes), but it then goes on to automatically put that list into five different formats including flashcards, a quiz, a learning set and a couple of games.
I can think of nothing better that learning in a fun way.
This free programme has allowed me to do that, together with many of my friends, and I hope that it can be useful to many of you out there, whether adults or children.
Great studying !!
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