Personal Curriculums

Since I am in my late thirties now, and I’m generally pretty jaded, I usually reflexively hate internet trends.

It irks me when I suddenly get a YouTube feed full of videos on the same bloody thing. The generous argument would be this is a community in conversation, by my cynical side sees it as professional Content Creators picking up topics for the clicks and revenue with nothing new to add. Lately, this has been floods of negativity about the state of publishing, the steady decline in the quality of books being published, etc, etc. I’ve honestly found it all very depressing.

But… then very occasionally something beautiful comes out of it, and magically provides the spark I was needing to finally ignite an idea I’ve been slowly building in the back of my own brain.

This morning, I saw a video from Elizabeth at Plant Based Bride on YouTube: How to Create a Personal Curriculum 101 🎓 My First Term of Self-Directed Learning, and I’ve gotten really excited.

I had no idea bout this trend, I guess it is a TikTok thing originally. It’s a push back against this idea of ‘brain rot’ and those people who proudly read to “turn off their brains.” It’s using your own brain to learn and think about things, to follow your passions, to feel alive and not just kind of ‘mushy’ from passively consuming media and doomscrolling on your smartphone.

Elizabeth credits another Elizabeth on TikTok as the originator. This is the video: xparmesanprincessx.

I also watched this video 🧠 the Anti Brain Rot Reading Challenge by [‪@thisstoryaintover‬], which someone posted in the comments, with a different Content Creator creating a similar kind of framework for intentional reading.

Then I had a video from Cinzia (Lady of the Library) pop into my feed, and she gave a different perspective on the idea of self-directed learning, as a PHD student who’d burned out in recent years. She’s very supportive of this trend, but just wanted to provide some gentle cautions against the pitfalls with some tips. You can watch that here: Self-Education: How to Build a Personal Curriculum

I’d come across her before in my feed, and often I find her very posh accent grating, and must fight the urge to immediately turn her off, which is definitely just a primal British class/region prejudice (maybe a topic for my future curriculum list!). I’ve attempted to listen to some London Review of Books podcasts recently and have a similar problem! I usually have to power through the first few minutes and acclimatise to it… which is bizarre, I know!¹ In this case, I am so glad I did, she said she recorded it with no script, and consequently, she felt really natural and heartfelt on a topic she has lived and learned the hard way, but is very passionate about.

She said something at the end that really resonated with me.

What really it it’s all about is sort of meeting yourself and finding where you fit in not just the world today, but the world of literature and the world of science and the world of philosophy and the world of mathematics or the world of music or the world of crafting. Wherever you fit yourself in, you suddenly go, “Oh, I’m part of a thing. I’m part of something greater than myself. I’m suddenly part of understanding the past and the present.” and the people who have studied this before me and the people who have created this and the people who laid this groundwork and you suddenly fit into a tapestry that you weren’t really aware that you could

Yes! Exactly this. This is my ultimate aim!

I have been rolling around in the back of my mind how I can be more intentional with what I put into my brain and help me to focus my ideas, and just feel like my brain is working, alive and making new connections! I actually wrote a post about this a few weeks ago when I was cleaning up my RSS feeds: Input.

Some other things I’ve been working on or thinking about in this pursuit in the last few months:

• I’ve recently bought some second-hand art reference books to help with my embroidery ideas.
• I subscribed to The London Review of Books, so I’m exposing myself to more ideas and ‘quality’ writing.
• I started (finally) keeping reading logs for every book I read: A new approach to tracking reading with Obsidian Bases and generally improving the quality of my notes in Obsidian, and ways to make connections.
• And for comic books: Tracking my Digital Comic Book Reading in Obsidian
• And I have been keeping notes to track embroidery artists and projects I find inspiring.
• I’ve been thinking about methods to start annotating my physical books… maybe sticky tabs and notes (but a lot of the nice ones are plastic, which I don’t like).

Now I have this framework of making myself a Personal Curriculum to bring it all together. This is what I need to do – fucking plan out intentionally what I want to learn or explore, and give myself the focused time to do it. Plan in advance, including the resources I can use, so I don’t waste time looking for them and getting distracted down different rabbit holes. Set myself goals and projects to test my learning.

As is usual with my slowly realised ‘epiphanies’, I’m sure this kind of thing is obvious to many other people who have the brains of natural studiers. Or those who have a lot of free time to figure this out!

Making the time is going to be the challenge for me… how can I make this work realistically for myself when I work 40-hour workweeks and have to also do other adult life things, and allow my brain to relax!

I definitely need to noodle on how this can work for me.

I am very excited about this idea! I was meant to prep some blog posts this morning, and wrap Christmas presents (and do some walking), but instead I’ve spent nearly 4 hours watching those videos and writing a list of topics I’d like to investigate!

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1. If you’re British and reading this, then maybe you know what I mean! ↩︎