THE ART OF LEARNING

January 26th, 2021

Many teachers fall into an understandable trap slyly laid by the ego.  Being the one in the know there is a pride in the ability to dispense and provide one’s superior set of knowledge to those in the role of ‘student’.  More than a few teachers, professors or just friends trying to help parade their privileged position with more than a little pomp.  It’s an understandable trap because teaching, by default, has an air altruism and generosity attached to it as though the credentials wipe away any flaws in actual performance.  The real world of course functions on the opposite principle, actual performance tops credentials every time.

The very best teachers understand that teaching is not a privileged position in terms of knowledge but a special liminal role.  The goal is to get someone who can’t or doesn’t know, to understand or do.  It’s perhaps poetic but a little quaint to say a teacher is a shepherd in the process of someone else’s learning.  This is true, but it goes beyond this.  A great teacher doesn’t teach any one subject but teaches a student how to learn.  The metaphorical equivalent would be a shepherd that trains all it’s sheep to be wolves, capable of taking care of themselves all on their own without the help of the shepherd.

Autodidacitism is a key to great teaching.  This is self-teaching, or learning on your own.  The double role that a person casts themselves in creates an important curve of perspective.  The self-learner isn’t just trying to figure out something new, but also paying attention to aspects and trends of their own learning.  The self-learner has to shepherd their own motivation, cultivating it and protecting it against too much frustration.  This is a crucial aspect that often isn’t present with an actual teacher who provides encouragement and reassurance that the next step of success isn’t far off.  The self-learner has to nurture motivation in the absence of knowing what’s around the next bend, and this skill, if honed becomes an exceptional asset when that self-learner in turn becomes a teacher for someone else.

The art of learning becomes a topic independent of subject, and the pure autodidactic clues in fairly quickly to the fact that if the art of learning can be honed than all the world’s knowledge and know-how suddenly becomes a split oyster.  There’s simply no contest between someone who learns one thing well, and another person who learns how to learn.  

Great teachers are themselves great learners, and because of this, the division between student and teacher remains forever blurred as the teacher learns alongside the student.  A classroom or a mentorship, no matter how behind or oblivious the student is an opportunity for the teacher.  Often that opportunity is to learn deeper about the subject at hand by exploring a student’s unique slow-motion capture of the topic.  Most likely a student asks a question never before considered by a teacher.  A weak teacher will freeze up at the idea of something they don’t know, and usually try to dodge the question.  Whereas a great teacher grows evermore curious with such unconsidered angles.  But beyond this, the opportunity to understand more about the art of learning is perpetually on hand in any classroom.  The swirl of student perspective, patchy in it’s blindness of the topic is the real object at hand for any teacher.

Knowledge is secondary.  The classroom as a laboratory is primary.  A teacher who is in tune with this meta-subject of learning irregardless of topic becomes doubly equipped for future students, by both having a deeper understanding of the subject and a deeper understanding of how students learn that subject.

The outlooks of the good and the bad teacher could not be more antithetical.  While the gatekeeper of knowledge is concerned with the ego’s pleasure of a power dynamic, the great teacher has never stopped seeing the classroom as a place to learn, not just for the student, but for that teacher who remains a student.

The great teacher becomes a student in the art of teaching, which is no different than a student who pursues the art of learning.

NAVIGATING MISTAKES

January 25th, 2021

There’s an ideal and a hope that mistakes can be crept up on, tip-toed around, and altogether avoided if only the right degree of caution is exercised.  For some things, very larger things, this sort of ideal is a necessity.  It would be an irreversible mistake if we had recklessly stumbled into nuclear war, as it seems we’ve come very close to several times over the years.  Many AI researchers also believe that Artificial Intelligence is also an area that poses great potential harm, meriting a need to move slowly and carefully along the path of progress.  But on an individual level, the risk and downside of making a mistake is rarely if ever of such a magnitude, even relatively speaking.  

The majority of our hesitation and fear of mistakes probably arises from a school system which was singularly focused on mistakes which detracted from a perfect score.  The straight-A student is essentially a student who made no mistakes, no missteps.  

As impressive as that feat might be in the eye of say - college admission bureaucrats, there is very little real world utility in the perfect score.  The most capable and successful are those who can squeeze every last bit of insight from a mistake - not success.  The ability to reapply with a more nuanced understanding is the key to a great deal of progress and personal success.

A large concern with avoiding mistakes likely just generates a kind of procrastination.  It’s an excuse bred by a hammered-in notion of preparing for the test, but outside of school, the best things we can accomplish are additive: they are things we build, be it companies, a piece of writing, a house, a friendship, a career, a reputation or any variety of project.

Life is much more like the blank page as opposed to the test with predesigned answers.  The mistakes made while adding to the blank page contain the real jewels of learning, because a mistake  encapsulates a blindspot - an area where our idea of the world is flawed.  The mistake in real time is an opportunity to zero in on this flaw and fix it, making our measure of the world a bit richer, a bit more nuanced.

Navigating mistakes isn’t so much about avoiding them at all costs but using them as places to pivot, like sign posts that point towards a better direction.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: PATIENT PILGRIM

January 24th, 2021

The pilgrims filtered one by one through the narrow passage into the cave.  The attendant who lead them walked up to Lucilius’s side who opened his eyes and smiled at the attendant.

“These students have journeyed from very far to learn from you,” the attendant said.

Lucilius nodded at the group that had assembled before him.

“They say,” said the attendant, “that one of their group reached enlightenment under the guidance of the last master they trained under.”

Lucilius looked at the group curiously, then turned to his attendant.  “Which one?” He asked.

The attendant translated Lucilius’ request and in a moment it was clear, the group turning to look at a young man sitting among them.

“Ask this enlightened one for me,” Lucilius said,  “what is enlightenment like?”

The attendant translated and the whole group listened as the enlightened student spoke.  Lucilius looked to the attendant when he was finished.

“He says that he’s had no thoughts since his enlightenment some weeks ago.”

Lucilius grew more curious, smiling with some delighted amusement.  There did seem to be a particularly serene air around this one individual in the group, and clearly the rest of the group held this person in a bit of awe, reverence.  

“No thoughts…really?” Lucilius said mostly to himself.  “Well,” he continued.  “We are all a patient bunch of people, being interested in meditation…”

The attendant translated as Lucilius paused with his points.

“We have no issue waiting.  So we will wait for your next thought,” Lucilius said nodding toward the student.

The attendant finished translating, and the smile upon the enlightened student remained - for a moment.  But as slivers of time began piling up, a lace of doubt seemed to thread into the face of that enlightened student.  The serene smile seemed to relax to a more neutral pose, and the glow in his eyes seemed to sober and clear.

“Oh…” the student said.  He said something more, and Lucilius looked to the attendant for aide.

“He thinks he may have just had a thought,” the attendant said.

The two, along with everyone else continued to watch the enlightened student until he said something else.

“Yes, he seems to be thinking now,” the attendant said.

Lucilius nodded gravely.

“Well,” he said, “now that that’s out of the way, shall we begin our practice?”  

FEED THE WRITER

January 23rd, 2021

A desire to write doesn’t always come with an idea.  How many countless hours have been spent agonizing over the blank page and blinking cursor?  Like any system that creates, it requires an input.  We do not magically generate inspiration from no where.  All ideas come from some kind of connection between two or more parts outside of ourselves.  And the best input for the writing mind is, reading.

This is perhaps the most obvious but under-utilized hack for getting the words to start flowing on the page.  The short version of the hack is to just read until you find yourself disagreeing with the author, and then to simply write down why and what.

A second version of this hack is to literally copy out the words of another, and then just branch off once the flow is there.  Hunter S. Thompson supposedly typed out the entirety of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald just so that he could know what it was like to write a great novel.  But the exercise likely had more benefit than he planned.

Most often though, reading reminds of other things, and remembering isn’t simply a reminder but a connection: between the text at hand and something else.  It’s that connection that often hides the kernel of an idea to be explored, written about.

It’s perhaps funny to think that staring at a blank page perpetuates much of the same.  Reading nothing means, writing nothing.

ADDITIVE LEARNING

January 22nd, 2021

Can a grade become an identity?  The quintessential cocktail party question hints at an answer.  What is the question that arises without fail between two strangers making chit chat?  What do you do?  

More than a name, or a family, or a history, we define one another primarily by what we do.  Putting the virtues and folly of this habit aside, it’s worthy to examine how this habit effects the young, as encapsulated by this question:

How did you do on the test?

If a child does poorly on a test, what effect does that have on that kid’s sense of identity?  Attaching one’s self to an identity is certainly a poor idea, but during youth it’s an anxious consideration, and perhaps even a temporary necessity.  The straight A student is commonly introduced as such to extended family and friends, but what about the student struggling with D’s and C’s?  He spends time with his friends and likes the drums. 

We are all painfully aware of the hierarchical frameworks with which we class people.  Grades are an enormously misplaced part of these frameworks - this isn’t a new thought.  Even many straight-A students sense something wrong with this grading system.  But few can explain why, and how it’s such a bad system.

The answer hinges on two important concepts.  The first is that practice is a self-reinforcing system.  We tend to think of practice as a regular action that improves something.  But think of a practice in terms of eating.  Everyone eats every day.  As a quick aside, the word practice comes from the Latin practizare meaning merely ‘perform’ or ‘carry out’.  This is what we do with eating everyday, we perform an act of consumption, we carry out a diet either by design or whim.  Does the practice here mean that we are all improving our diets steadily by default of simply eating?  No not at all.  But the practice does reinforce itself.  Poor food choices perpetuate, and it’s not unlikely that such choices perpetuate in a worse direction through.. practice.  It doesn’t take much practice before we have an epidemic of obesity.

If this concept of self-reinforcing practice is imported into the world of education, and eating is swapped out for test-taking, what sort of conclusions suddenly become apparent for the kid who regularly tests poorly?  Is such a practice likely to change and improve?

The second important concept necessary to understand the enormous flaw of tests is as simple as the comparison between subtraction and addition.  Tests are all about subtraction.  Any test has a perfect score, and with each misstep, some percentage is subtracted from this perfect score.  Our concentration on the student, from the perspective of the teacher, the parents, society, and even the student is all about how they mess up.  Grades are defined by how much they miss the perfect score, not by how many good answers have added up to this deficit.

The dismal ramifications of this perspective are heartbreakingly easy to point out:  we come to think that we should be perfectly prepared for what happens tomorrow, or next week, as though each action is part of a test.  So we overthink, trying to see all the places where we might misstep as opposed to just getting started and figuring it out along the way.  

The reality is that mistakes and missteps are where the real jewels of learning exist, but the industrial education system teaches us to avoid such mistakes and mistakes like death itself, and so learning on a large scale - especially self-directed learning - is impeded by a massive psychological gridlock.

If we grade a deep sea angler on the same metrics that we would a bird like a hawk, then it’s clear the angler is an absolute failure of a bird.  But of course this misses the fact that it’s a fish.  And unlike the bird, it’s learned how to hunt in pitch dark miles below the surface of the water.

The differences are eye-rollingly obvious, of course, but grading a fish like a bird is much what the industrial grading system does to some people.  There’s a certain knack to test taking, and those who strike upon it just end up being able to game the system for their benefit.  The point of education certainly isn’t to get all kids to clue into this knack: that’d be just as much of a waste of time and effort.  No, the resolution of these dismal and constipated practices has to do with that other operation of arithmetic: not subtraction, but addition.

Society and civilization is something we’ve built.  It’s an additive result of countless generations working hard to literally put things together.  Society has not emerged by the result of some kind of test that matches our ability against some sort of perfect grade - some sort of utopia that we falsely imagine might be a perfect grade.  No, society was constructed through exploration and tinkering.  By putting things and systems and people together and seeing what happens.  And look at what this practice has yielded.  We now have smartphones, vaccines that can be literally printed, that is put together in a weekend.  We have so many varieties of connecting it even seems to be backfiring.  But of course this is part of the process.  We try something and watch the effects.  And the whole thing ratchets ever upward as a result.

This sort of volley between effort and result is completely absent in the realm of test-taking.  You get one shot.  It doesn’t matter how you’d react to the result of your effort, that’s it, the grade is stamped, and the machine rolls onward.

It seems that it’d go without saying that the point of education is to produce better learners. But few if any seem to be saying this, let alone concentrating on how to make it happen.  If we were producing better learners than by the end of the absurdly long educational process, most all students would have learned to figure out the knack of test taking, but of course that isn’t happening: each student is practicing their trend, knack or not.

This focus on additive versus subtractive is one of the keys to redesigning education to work.  It’s quite strange and frankly sad to realize that building a company has more in common with playing with LEGO as a kid than it has anything to do with school.  

Lego is an excellent visual example.  When a kid builds something on their own, of their own creation, we do not see what it could have been, we only see what was actually achieved, and it’s likely something to celebrate, even if merely for the effort.  But school is all about what a student has failed to achieve by measure of a somewhat arbitrary design.  The vast difference between concentrating on negative space versus positive form cannot be over emphasized.  How can we ever expect students to have the courage to start companies and build new things if we’ve had them focused almost exclusively on what they might get wrong?  It’s a bit of a miracle that anyone does make it through with a sense of wonder, curiosity and a drive to build intact.

Imagine a different classroom, with a different agenda.  Imagine sitting down for the first class of the semester and the teacher says: this year, you are going to launch a business, and this classroom is your resource, to ask questions and explore together what each of your businesses might look like and how to make the finances work.  As part of the state’s economic growth initiative, you are each being allocated $1,000 to bootstrap your ideas so that the community can have a chance to explore your creativity and ingenuity.  

The teacher could be the one who signs off on the appropriateness of each business idea, which releases the funds which the teacher further verifies is spent in the designed methods.

Business is just one area that presents a comprehensive example of additive learning: it requires integrating a variety of perspectives, learning a diverse set of skills and most importantly, it requires creativity.

And most importantly, the difference between a failed business idea and a failing grade on a test couldn’t be more pronounced.  The failed test automatically ranks someone against everyone else who did better, whereas, no one can really tell if a business idea is going to work or not, and when it fails, it’s much easier to take that failure as feedback instead of adopting it as an identity.  Even a failed business effort is usually full of lessons to learn that can then be applied to a new attempt, whereas with a failed test, there’s nothing to learn because the chance to apply it has already passed.