I still suffer mental anguish when trying to read and learn Physics even for my own personal development. I realise I had built a wall around my mental stress and isolated what seemed to me to be an inferno in the mind that had affected me physically with great stress. Every time I try to approach the boundary of this inferno in my mind which is still burning thirty years on, it sets off the stress and I feel the same physical symptoms approaching that I had at university , though I can manage it by retreating and starting to learn a different way…
At Uni in the 80’s there was not the internet and the vast online resources it brings to you, even to your device in your pocket., videos , online lectures etc..
There was your lecturer and very dry textbooks which you bought a couple of and accessed some more in the library..

A lecturer dictated such a book to me over late 1988 to early 1989.
He read the sentences in the most dull voice I have ever heard , then wrote the sentences on the board, pausing for the class to write the sentences into their notes before continuing in that boring voice the next sentence.
for diagrams he’d put a worn overhead transparency on the OHT.projector.

At Christmas, I found the book he was dictating to us word by word.

It demoralised me but I then thought, why is he dictating from a pile of old A4 notes? It dawned on me that those were the lecture notes he had copied from his lecturer who subsequently published them !
That was it, there was nothing else to remember except that rows of students sat copying solutions from each other to pass the tutorials and progress, thus how many physics teachers are terrible at teaching the subject….. I was gone, exam stress took hold, I was drowning in a sea of copied information….someone at the student advisory center called me “stupid”, I had no reply, eyes down a failure- in truth I was trying not to pass out with the stress as my neck was so tense…
I took up running, that eased the stress… I was running away from something but at least I felt I wasn’t dying, I could do “the circuit” and the “final hill” five times after all!
Since that time , I have obviously struggled to get jobs that pay enough to be able to live in places I really want to live in, but things have worked out. I joined a band, I started to self educate.. I am in establishments but not in the jobs there where I possibly would have ended up and been under stress, I have huge amounts of my own time to develop myself my way.
I increased my ability on musical performance way more than I would have been able to do in one of those stressful jobs. I have been lucky, my rent is low and leaves a detailed amount to be able to get involved in the various courses offered by the University of Life.
You don;t need to follow the boring lecturers in the Uni of Life, you can discard them and follow inspirational people instead..

I am no Einstein, but his philosophy of education was spot on. He was actually good at mathematics and pretty good on the violin too. He didn’t care for being told what to do in his life

Our next door neighbour, back in the 80s told of her sister who had been at a party in the 30s where Einstein had been present and at some point in the evening had picked up his fiddle and started to play.
She was sitting next to Einstein’s wife who remarked
“Ah my Albert.!.. If only he could practise more, he could be good!”

Well, Albert can be forgiven for maybe not having as much time to practise while having a bad decade in the 30’s with tragic family events and the rise of the Nazis, but any time playing music is beneficial in the University of Life.