"Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest."  - The Book of Common Prayer 1667

That description of the educational process is still valid over 300 years later.

I've talked before about the importance of reading and the treasure of information and inspiration that is available to us through books.  However, just reading it is not enough.

When I was in college I would highlight important passages in my text books and write notes in the margin.  That made it easy to go back and review information in preparation for tests.  That is still a valid way to approach a book on showmanship, for example Maximum Entertainment by Ken Weber.  However, once I have highlighted a book I tend to overlook the other passages when I go back to it.  That can limit your future education.  I have one customer who purchased two sets of my Creativity For Entertainers trilogy so that he would have one set to mark up now and another to keep for future reference.

Another way to mark information is to take notes.  Studies have shown that you remember something that you write down much longer than something you have just heard or seen. 

Computers make it easy to store notes, but there are some drawbacks.  First, it appears that the physical act of writing plays a part in retention.  Also, technology continues to evolve and you can loose information that has been stored electronically.  When I was living in Southern California I used an extensive entertainment archive at the University of Southern California to research the life and career of Red Skelton.  I entered all my notes into a computer and saved them onto floppy discs.  Unfortunately the word processing program that I used then is no longer available.  The current word processing programs are not able to read the format of the earlier files so I lost all of that information.  I recently found that I sometimes have problems using MS Word to read files that were written with an earlier version of MS Word.  For that reason I believe that it is vital to keep paper copies of important information.

If you are using multiple sources of information a notebook, journal, or file folder is valuable.  That way you can collect related information together and not have to keep referring to the original source.  I recently read seven different books while studying the history of clowning in South East Asia.  I found that keeping notes as I read and putting them into one notebook made it much easier to compare facts and fit them together.

Marking is not enough.  The next step is to learn what you marked.  That requires repetition.  If it is information, we need to review it often to lock it into your memory.  If it is a skill, we need to actually perform the task.  You have to do it frequently to learn it, and then continue to do it often enough that you don't forget.  About five years ago I made dozens of origami elephants for table decorations at a banquet.  By the time I finished making all of them I had learned to do it well enough that I could fold the elephants rapidly without having to think about it.  Recently somebody saw me who had been at that banquet and asked me to show her how to fold the elephant.  I don't think I had made any since the banquet.  The first one that I tried didn't turn out right.  I finally remembered how to do it on my second attempt.  I hadn't folded an elephant frequently enough over the years to keep the method fresh in my brain.  Nothing stays the same.  We are either learning or forgetting.  We need to keep relearning the things that we know or we forget them.

Then after we learn something, we need to reflect upon it.  What general principles can you apply in other ways?  How does old information and new information fit together?  Is what you learned valid today?  How can you improve upon what you learned?  Sometimes you need to step away and allow the information to incubate in your subconscious before you gain new insights.

What are you reading to continue your education?  What is the best way to mark what you want to learn?  What is the best way to learn it?  What do you need to review so you don't forget it?  How can you reflect on what you have learned?