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fighting the lack of good ideas

if you do not explain the why, where, and when, the what does not matter

Posted on 31 July 20241 August 2024 By antipaucity No Comments on if you do not explain the why, where, and when, the what does not matter

Any time someone who does not understand the practical outworkings of a given topic tries to “teach” it, you end up with a “presentation” – mostly in the form of propositional statements (dogs are mammals; barges are boats), or key-value pairs (in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue; Caracas is the capital of Venezuela).

Propositional statements and key-value pairs are absolutely vital aspects of learning and understanding – but seeing how those ideas, facts, and statements will work themselves out in practical application is absolutely mandatory for proper understanding of the topic.

If you never learn how you might use these facts, you are going to have an incredibly difficult time “learning” them.

This is the fundamental problem of why “teaching to the test” (or, for that matter, relying too heavily on multiple-choice, true|false, matching, etc type “tests” to evaluate “learning” or “knowledge”) is problematic: I can teach pretty much anyone how to pass a multiple-choice test with zero knowledge of the subject material (did it myself years ago when I passed the first-tier amateur radio licensing exam without ever looking at any study guide).

When you “teach to the test” (which is what, fundamentally, exclusive reliance on propositional statements (and drills over them) and key-value pairs are), you create people who may (or may not) end up being good at trivia challenges … but have no mental framework for connecting all those dots into anything coherent – iow, you create human-based data lakes: it is all sitting there, but no connective lines have been drawn.

To get someone to want to learn, you have to show them why it “matters” – you have to get them to develop intrinsic motivation to learn (vs the purely extrinsic “you have to to pass”).

To develop that intrinsic motivation, you need to show the ‘why’ and the ‘where’ of the ‘what’.

And to do that you have to understand it yourself.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41119193

commentary, education, insights, reprint Tags:education, learning

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