Musings on the Path

Sometimes challenges lurk in unexpected places. I had a martial arts student who was 5\’10\” and 225+ pounds, a bit overweight and very strong. If his execution of a technique was even halfway decent, none of us could stop him. My challenge was to figure out how to challenge him.

Luckily, he found it himself by volunteering to help with the kids class. Part of the class was self-defense, but the most important part was coordination and balance exercises. Techniques that could not be \”muscled\”. So he had a reachable challenge that required a stretch both physical and emotional/mental. Little kids were doing things he couldn\’t, yet. Happily, he was up to the challenge. And his technique in the adults class improved.

For a while, my wife was a substitute science teacher. One of her assignments was to teach biology to a class of \”slow\” students. Having been warned that conventional approaches were ineffective, she tried a different tack. For their first assignment, they were to draw what they saw through a microscope. Even graduate students in biology can find this difficult. Her students breezed through the assignment making excellent drawings. This was a class of visual artists. Words did not mean nearly as much to them as images.

Learning to program in C is relatively easy, up to a point. But most self-taught learners bog down at pointers, one of the more difficult programming concepts. When I taught C pointers, I first described how they worked in C language terms. Then in computer architecture terms (most students had a computer architecture class by then). And I could see that around 40% of the class didn\’t get it. I went home and described my despair to my wife. Then a wonderful coincidence happened. That night I read Lewis Carroll\’s “Alice in Wonderland”, the section about the song, what the song\’s called, the name of the song, and what the name\’s called. It\’s a perfect matchup for pointers. The next class I read it to the class and could see that most of them comprehended.

Next time I might use the card catalog in a library as an analogy. The card is not the book, it points to where the book is stored.

Postscript: my wife, a therapist, sees that section as a description of a parentified child propping up an alcoholic father. Good teaching stories contain more than one lesson.

I hear and I forget.
I see and I remember.
I do and I understand.

Confucius

Research has found three major learning styles: visual (seeing), aural (hearing), and kinesthetic (moving). Most people have a preferred or dominant style, though most things can be learned through any of the three. It helps to figure out your preferred learning style and where available, use it. Note: some skills are best or only learned through certain learning styles. Book learning is fine for history though it can be learned through any of the three (e.g. re-enactment for kinesthetic learning). The finer points of physical skills, e.g. woodworking, require at least some kinesthetic learning. You must learn how to saw straight by doing it, by feeling the saw binding, chattering in the cut, etc. Learning which is your preferred learning style and going with it is the first level.

A second, more effective way is to combine learning styles—ganging up on ignorance. In class, I hear the presenter, see their body language and writing on the blackboard, and write notes, lots of notes. Writing is a kinesthetic experience. Plus I see my notes.

For a reading assignment, I see the text and write copious notes, missing only the aural experience. Two out of three beats one out of three. Note that highlighting or underlines sections of reading is not as effective as taking notes because there is not as much kinesthetic involvement.

Even physical skills can benefit from notetaking. The martial art I studied required a notebook with all the required techniques and some variations. By requiring you to reflect on what your body had learned, your ability to describe (i.e., teach) it to someone else was improved.

Improved, affordable technology can help too. For a long time I felt that my martial art techniques were not as good as other people my rank. I felt a lot more mistakes in my techniques than I saw in theirs. This was a double standard. Much smaller mistakes can be felt than can be seen. When I saw myself in video recordings, I was judging us all by the same standard. My skill level was comparable to my peers.

When I first heard the quote at the beginning of this post, I thought the author was saying doing was best. Now I think he’s saying, all three are best.