Overcoming the “I Don’t Want to Learn” Block: My Python Journey & Strategies

Python

Python has been the most systematic and longest‑studied programming language for me over the past two years, especially during my internship at a secondary school campus. After completing basic courses on an online platform, I entered the "advanced" stage and began feeling resistance that threatened to halt my learning.

The common cause of "not wanting to study" includes harder material, boredom, lack of time or enthusiasm; in my case the difficulty of the courses is the main factor.

During the basic stage, I dealt with data type definitions, simple functions, and loops—content I was already familiar with from MATLAB, C, and JavaScript, so the difficulty was low.

In the advanced stage, new concepts felt like walking alone in darkness, making progress feel isolated and slowing me down. The previous learning approach no longer works, so I need new methods.

Measures:

Adopt more "local" strategies by linking new concepts to familiar experiences, enhancing a sense of familiarity.

Increase practice to consolidate unfamiliar advanced material, tolerating longer learning times per topic.

Strengthen review by chunking learned content, reflecting on it, and understanding the origins of instructor questions.

Apply programming to real‑world problems, using code to clarify thought processes and reinforce learning.

My upcoming study plan is as follows: first, review previous material and express it with proper terminology; then, preview upcoming chapters and guess their content. Specifically, I will transition from functional programming to modular programming, practice functional concepts with selected applications, study decorators theoretically and through exercises, and explore introductory modular programming. The plan is illustrated below:

According to the new plan, I need to complete 15 sessions (equivalent to 7 chapters) to overcome the "don’t want to learn" dilemma, and this effort should be worthwhile.