How I'm studying for the Comptia A+ 220-1002 certification exam

Right after I started studying for the A+ about two weeks ago, I found a set of very useful blogs that detailed how they passed the A+ in about 2-3 weeks. Low and behold I found them saying the same things. Watch Professor Messer videos all at once without taking notes, take a practice exam form Jason Dion's Udemy course as a baseline, review and understand why you were wrong, memorize concepts you find difficult by taking notes or making flashcards for use with Anki, take another practice exam, wash rinse and repeat until you are consistently scoring over 85 % on the practice exams. 

I tried this out for the A+ 220-1001 and saw great success. I  felt a little burnt out as my break time between studying consisted of going and helping my sister out with her caregiving needs, although, my mom was doing most of the caregiving to give me time to study. Thanks mom!

I celebrated my first passed exam and proceeded to eat some cake and other foods my mother kept cooking for me, which don't follow my largely ketogenic style of eating. Well I lost three or so days to erratic energy levels and joint pain. (This is a post for another day) After recuperating, I started again with the Professor Messer videos and found that the 1002 was easier to study for, but I felt like I wasn't really grasping the concepts. In retrospect, I think I was still a little burnt out from the 1001. So, I decided to take some time off and actually apply some of the concepts that were glossed over in the exam that I couldn't really picture any use for, for example the gpupdate command. I did a little research and found the relationship with Active Directory and thought, "How cool!" I remembered I had downloaded Windows Server 2016 about a year ago and Nick's suggestion but never really played with it like I had planned. Now was the perfect chance. 

This leads me to something I noticed about myself that I saw a lot in the students I taught in Japan; namely, applicability. When you teach a new grammatical structure to the student, as my fellow Japanese teachers would do and then later move on to the application a lot gets lost on the students as they daydream and think about what they'll be eating for lunch that day. Instead, starting with some realia, like say a video showing a Japanese man ordering a loco-moco hamburger at a drive-thru restaurant in Hawaii and explaining to the students that they can get this same loco moco burger during their next trip there, (Japanese people visit Hawaii very frequently), if and only if they learn this grammatical pattern. This really grabs their interest and can even make learning otherwise very challenging grammar points enjoyable. I find I have to learn the applicability of the Windows command line commands I learn, for me not to forget it. 

Well, I wound up going on a huge tangent and wound up getting a Hyper-V virtual machine to run Windows Server alongside a few other Windows 10 installations. It's been challenging but really rewarding getting these working together. I'll update on the progress I make with Active Directory in later posts, so stay tuned. 

Now back to studying for the A+...