Topic 2 : Basic learning skills, problem-solving skills, and techniquesof self-directed learning.
Common questions that we often hear are: How can we understand what we hear? How can we think cleverly, read quickly and write professionally? We all know well that all of what we have mentioned before are important basic skills and competences that are necessary for our survival in our working life and in the world of learning.
Listening is the process of making sense out of what we hear. It is an act of receiving information through our ears. Hearing is the act of perceiving sound and receiving sound waves or vibrations through our ears. Hearing is one of the five senses and it just happens all the time. But if we listen, we are consciously choosing what we want to hear. We concentrate on what we hear in order to understand the message. So, hearing is a physical ability, while listening is an intellectual ability.
Speaking is the worldwide communicative behavior. The speaker can use both verbal and non-verbal languages to communicate with others. Speaking, thus, means people’s exchange of information or conversation with other people, using both sounds and gestures to convey their knowledge, opinions, and feelings to other people.
Reading is the process of constructing meaning from written texts. It is a complex skill requiring the coordination of a number of interrelated sources of information. Currently, there are scholars, academics, and writers presenting information, and various creative works which are published in books and other forms of publications. So, people’s ability to read is essential for the quality people in the current societies.
Writing is a method of representing language in a visual form to convey feelings, opinions, and needs, from one person to others. Writing is a must for communication in a daily life. Learners take notes of knowledge, do their exercises, and write to answer the questions in the exams. Other people generally write letters, contracts, wills, warranties, and so on. Merchants write advertisement, accounts, orders, and receipts. Doctors write the patients’ medical records, prescripts, and many others.
What does cause happiness and miseries?
There was a piece of news saying that a certain person won the firstprized lottery and was awarded millions of Baht. The lucky person became a millionaire overnight. You might have read the news. However, the luck the person had got was not a good luck at all. It was a kind of luck that brought the person both riches and miseries. He had to hide himself from a borrower and a robber who would visit him some days and asked for his money.
There used to be a study on a person who luckily became a millionaire overnight. The outcome of the study showed that some of these rich people suffered greater misery than ever afterwards. Some lost large amounts of money; one of them had to return to his old job - a janitor. In fact, it is our attitude, or our way of thinking that indicates whether we are happy or not. Happiness or miseries are in our mind, nowhere else.
Which way of thinking does bring us happiness?
There may not be only one way of thinking. Certainly, there are a lot of ways of thinking that bring happiness, but all these ways are based on the same thing. It is “optimism” or “To look at the world positively”. That is to say, we should always think and expect anything positively, even if we are in the bad situation.
However, it may take a person decade to really recognize what his life and happiness are. There is a good example for this: a well-known movie actor, Christopher Reeve, the superman in the Hollywood film very long time ago, had an accident falling off the horseback. He used to speak in a certain TV program, saying that he had to gradually adjust himself to the new situation in the beginning. But he finally became happy even though he still was unable to move his arms and legs as usual.
One of the managements of a subsidiary of Siam Wood Pulp Company who was once a paper- salesperson, said he was fortunate that he had been scolded by a customer over ten years ago. On that day, the customer who was the manager of a company on Sathu-pradit Road was extremely displeased with another paper-salesperson who raised the price of the paper abruptly.
And this cost the company a large amount of money. The former papersalesperson tried hard to win the customer, and it took him 6 months to get a big order from the company manager. “I really appreciated the crisis in the past. It enabled me to realize what the sale career was, and it gave me a very good lesson that I had been using ever since.”
From the above examples, we can conclude as follows:
1. A successful man usually confronted serious crisis, and gained some lessons.
2. A person who is happy in his working life normally has a positive way of thinking which is well approved.
If you wish to be happy, you must begin by creating a positivethinking
and look at every happening with the eyes of love.
You have developed your skills of reading, and writing effectively. They are the skills needed to pursue the knowledge.