As far as I know, there are three main types of people in medicine wrt learning: Those who get it quickly but have low retention, those who take a long time to get it, but have high retention, and those who are both quick on the uptake and equipped with excellent blood-brain barriers.

This angsty rant will concern the first two types. Fast learner/low retention. That means you understand stuff the first time it's said, and sometimes even when the person hasn't finished explaining. However, you forget details easily.

In a group (especially in secondary school classes!), the slowlearn/highrets often limit the speed of the group because they don't understand, and will have to have things explained to them. This means that the speed of information dispensation is reduced to the lowest common speed, which is the speed the slowlearn/highrets have.

This effectively destroys the competitive advantage that the fastlearn/lowrets have, because they already understand, but have to wait for the sl/hrs to understand before a new point can be put across. This also means that the sl/hrs will have understood, and also have memorized the points put across in the additional time they've taken to understand.

This puts the fastlearn/lowrets at a disadvantage, because they're forced to learn at slower speeds, and therefore have less time afterward to memorize stuff, because they were caught in the lower learning speed.

Of course, one might say, while things are being explained to the slowlearn/highrets, the fastlearn/lowrets can simply spend that extra time memorizing the stuff, so it all works out, and the two should come out equal. That's true in theory

In real life, there are a few reasons none of what I've written appears to have a large impact.
1. Time isn't divided into nice little blocks that can be converted to different use without opportunity cost. For example, if you've already understood something and try to memorize something while it's being explained to other people, the talking is extremely distracting. This means that there is still a net loss of time for the fastlearn/lowret group.
2. Teachers teach at the lowest common rate, and sometimes this slow speed of information dissemination inhibits fast understanding. People are long-winded, they don't get to the point, they don't tell you what the point is, so you can't make the link yourself, there are many other factors that result in this sort of thing making it hard for fastlearn/lowrets to fully take advantage of their competitive advantage
3. Even assuming that you can make proper use of the extra time between understanding and further explanation, trying to memorize something for 20s (during the in-between time when understanding and extra explanation takes place), then having to switch back to listen is extremely disruptive, further disrupting learning.
4. However, the slowlearn/highrets don't usually ask questions when they don't understand in real life, so the learning speed in real life is really limited by the teacher more often than by other factors.

Anyway. This is just another of those angsty entries that come about when you try to be good at medical school, but get steamrolled and overrun by other people (who sometimes make it look effortless). Oh, the shame!

written at 12:35 a.m.