Terrible at Trivia

Future coworkers, please don’t invite me to trivia. I will not be a help.

I am terrible at trivia. Memorizing vocabulary and disconnected facts is a weakness.

I am studying for a trivia test. At least, studying for the Amazon Web Services Certified Cloud Practitioner exam feels like prepping for trivia night out. The practice tests, which I trust are similar to the actual test, have a lot of names of services. Amazon offers a lot of services. For example, which of these services helps you with who may have changed a setting? Detective, Inspector, Config, CloudTrail, X-ray.

This is an excellent question from the point of view of not being able to guess from context!

But, if you have yet to use Amazon services extensively or helped set up a corporate transition to the cloud, it is simply memorization. I’ve watched videos, made flashcards, re-read notes, and typed lists. I have terrible recall. I need some context to help settle the words into long-term memory.

I can learn seemingly obscure details. I had the coordinates for ten or more protostars and calibration quasars memorized when I was actively doing telescopic observations. I had many physics equations at the tip of my whiteboard marker while teaching. Those were not things I learned on purpose. They got stuck in my brain after being applied repeatedly in context.

I am great with concepts and putting a whole together out of parts once I know how the pieces fit. Getting the precise words to go with the ideas takes me a little longer.

Vocabulary for vocabulary’s sake is trivia. Getting the precise word for the concept you discuss with peers is different. I may not have the Type 1 and Type 2 difference verbatim right now, but I know what these errors mean in a statistical context. Flashcards won’t help, but talking with other knowledgeable people and combining the concepts with the vocabulary will.