"i guess my question is am i doing it right?"
Er, no. To begin with that's not a ham band, 50-54MHz is 6M and you won't hear foreign stations from Ohio unless we get one hell of an opening next summer. If that's what you want you'll have to listen to the HF bands, the bottom end of 40M below the broadcasters at night would be a good place to start, 75M is another.
As far as procedure goes HF and VHF are considerably different, you really can't learn one by listening to the other so you need to learn them both, listen to them both. Sooner or later you may upgrade to General and earn more HF privileges, listen, learn and you'll be ready. CW is a world all its own and an interesting mode, if you don't already know the code it's good to learn and a whole new world opens up to you. Hint: when you know Morse you can identify repeaters both Amateur and other by the CWID.
Rather than writing a book that would be required to educate you I suggest you pick up some publications on propagation already out there to help your understanding of when and where to listen. Propagation charts on line will keep you up to the minute but some are a bit complicated so you'll have to lean the basics before you may interpret the data.
Maybe some of you guys can help me out on this, all I have bookmarked are probably a bit much for him so maybe you know of some simple and easy to read global plots?
