I have always had a very naturalistic learning style, more jazz than classical. I study as the mood hits me, reading this entire book and that, absorbing as much information as I can get on a wide variety of subjects until I can understand almost any of them. Sure, I may not remember this specific term or that. But I understand how all the various doohickeys and thingamajigs fit together. To me, it's fun to learn that way. I see the forest rather than getting hung up on the trees. That sort of studying carried me far in Community College. But since starting University, one thing that I've noticed is that it's harder for me to actually learn anything. There's so much structure, and it encourages a rote-memorization style of learning: Absorb this flash card and that until you can remember all the terminology. But for someone like myself, who's concerned with practical applications and how things work, it becomes very difficult to be absorbed in this old dead white guy or that, or this term or that. I'm getting used to seeing comments like "Your description of that feature and its function is entirely correct, but it's the Linea Aspera, not the 'long rough bit that runs down the femur' so you're wrong." To be honest, I could give two [censored]s about what it's called. I want to know how it works and how I can apply that in real life. But to me, it seems that University does nothing to teach about how you might apply something in real life. Then the whole grading system ends up with me worrying about memorizing this and that, what might be on the quiz or exam, rather than studying the whole shebang and getting a proper understanding. It almost seems schizophrenic. "Remember this word and this" rather than "What are the rules of the language and how do we apply them." or "Study this, not that" rather than "Why not all?!" For example, in linguistics I tend to do very well with translations but fail at remembering specific vocabulary. The sentence translates itself for me, but I have to spend hours and hours and hours to memorize words and declensions and conjugations that I already know in practice and can easily be gleaned from context. Ah, I'm probably making zero sense. End of the day, I feel like I'm actually learning very little, since I have to spend so much time learning inefficient nonsense, rather than getting training for a career.

Anyone actually get what I'm talking about? Any advice on how to deal with it? Anyone else have a particular learning style that conflicts with the one that's catered to in education? Any ideas on how the education system might be improved?