My insight into rembering things in schools was not taking copious amounts of notes. I found that if I drew a picture of the topic(for instance a Femur bone), and then placed the names of the protuberenses and holes on the picture. My retention increased dramitscially. I could bring up the picture of the page in my mind, sometimes down to a misspelled word. This is noting new, but if you are a poor student--try this technique.

Learning anatomy is easy--I know, but any subjects will work with the incorporation of a drawing on each page(in your hand writing)

Learing to put up static and dynamic websites(what I am currently doing) makes visual remberance almost impossible.

I have found that learing Java, RoR, bootstrap, ect. was very are for my previous way of memorizing. I have now resorted to downloading courses I need. I'm too old to sit through twenty hours of instruction. Sixty percent seems redundant, or an instructor tacking about his personal life. I found an answer.

The answer, for me, was the Faster feature on VLC. If the teacher has good diction you can get speeds up to 1.60x. This depends on the instructor of course. David Mann(wrong spelling), who teaches cs 75 at Harvard is perfect for this type of speed learning. Don't get me wrong--David s a brilliant teacher, but I found I could speed up his lectures and the subject made more sense. I'm using David as an example because he as perfect diction. I tried this on foreign teachers and it did not work--because I was not used to their diction.

Oh, yea, if you are totally new to programming--listen to lectures on your iPod. You will be surprised how much you retain while exercising, or sone other mundane activity. Yes--you will miss the visual, but you will get the buzz words and when you go back to the lectures there are much easier to understand--at sometimes 1.7x speed.