What do teachers and poets have in common? Everybody, including family, tries and avoids both. Because like poets, who crave an audience to recite their poems to, teachers are perpetually on the lookout for students to teach. The two groups do it for different reasons though. While the poets cannot help it because of vanity, the teachers do it because they are smart (or that is what I like to think, being a teacher myself). Let me elaborate on this point after getting some preliminaries out of the way.
Learning is gratifying like few other things ever can be. The catch, however, is that learning –worthwhile learning at any rate –rarely comes easy. Frustration stemming from lack of progress and sometimes outright impenetrability of the subject matter are unavoidable parts of scholarship.
At the risk of boring the reader, let me share a few words of autobiography. Lifelong learning –which has been a buzz phrase for some time now –was forced on me when I had to spend much of my time during my stint in industry poring through textbooks and handbooks to try and figure out what I had missed/forgot from all the stuff taught at school. This activity only increased in intensity when I switched to teaching as a full-time job, although, with multiple experiences of teaching kids and friends while a student myself, I had never exactly been a stranger to teaching. Having gone through all the various levels of learning from prep school to PhD and passing through one right now, I believe I know what I am talking about. So much for my credentials.
Let me make it clear at the outset that I will focus on cognitive learning alone; practical skills will remain squarely outside the scope of discussion. Neither do I propose to go into the details of modes here: preference for books, lectures or videos; partiality to hard copies or e-books; reliance on old-fashioned journals or electronic files for record-keeping; liking for group or individual study, etc. The right choices in such matters sometimes depend on the subject to be learnt. More often however, these are personal preferences– one being as good as the other so long as it works for the individual. Instead, I would merely recommend two general techniques that I have found beneficial when it comes to successful and efficient learning irrespective of what it is that is being learnt.
The first method is an emotional trick that amounts to self-shaming: of asking oneself whether one is so dense as not to be able to comprehend something that another mortal had figured out or devised or discovered usually years, decades, sometimes centuries ago. Pride or ego (of the good sort) usually takes over, leading to satisfactory results. This trick does not always work though, which somewhat reduces its efficacy.
The second method not only works better than the first in terms of the quality of learning but is also superior in that it works every time. In my opinion, it is therefore the best way to go about the business of learning. The method amounts to teaching what one wants to learn.
As processes, simply learning something and learning the same thing to teach it are worlds apart. The latter is an active pursuit while the former is merely passive. Focus rarely materializes without a clearly defined goal in sight. No-doubt, broad-based knowledge has its place in education, but it is very easy to fall into the deadly trap of ‘knowing’ about things without really understanding them in any meaningful way. Too often knowledge is too abstract to be useful. In fact, superficial, vague knowledge is outright dangerous at times. Anything worth knowing is worth learning in concrete terms.
Recommending teaching a subject somebody needs to learn in the first place might sound like circular thinking or outright absurd. Rest assured; it is not. Montaigne, when he invented the essay as a literary genre, had struck upon an extremely valuable tool to learn and think. It has proved to be so effective as a device because one seldom knows what one really thinks about any issue until one puts it on paper. Of course, it inevitably involves fact checking, research and much reflection, but all these ingredients rarely come together effectively except when one sits down to write. Hence the essay as the vehicle to figure out what one thinks.
It was in the same vein that Dalton Trumbo once told a budding screenwriter who was struggling to put his finger on the feelings of a boy who he had seen weeping in the first row of a bullfighting arena when everybody around him was having an absolute ball: ‘Write it, and you will know.’
Doing what one does not know how to do has been referred to for some years now by the fancy name of project-based learning with an even fancier acronym PBL. The name may be of recent vintage; the concept is as old as the mountains. The project can be anything, including achievement of cognitive competence of a subject– hence the concept of teaching to learn.
Here, we finally return to the teachers who we left in the opening paragraph looking for somebody– anybody!– to teach to. Smart folks that they are, they know that while it is open to question whether (and how much) their students would learn; what is beyond debate is that they, by virtue of the act of teaching, would certainly benefit. How much one knows of the subject beforehand matters very little. The benefit materializes every time– if not in learning something new, then in the form of fresh insights or deepening of understanding of what one already knew. Learning is accelerated for two reasons. First, one’s frame of mind is completely different when one learns with a mind to teaching it. Second, teaching always helps reinforce the concepts and highlight errors.
As processes, simply learning something and learning the same thing to teach it are worlds apart. The latter is an active pursuit while the former is merely passive. Focus rarely materializes without a clearly defined goal in sight. No-doubt, broad-based knowledge has its place in education, but it is very easy to fall into the deadly trap of ‘knowing’ about things without really understanding them in any meaningful way. Too often knowledge is too abstract to be useful. In fact, superficial, vague knowledge is outright dangerous at times. Anything worth knowing is worth learning in concrete terms.
