A Good Student Consults With Many Teachers
This is my last post as a staff writer for Lifehacker, so I want to give you some meta tips. If you want to learn a new skill, don’t use just one YouTube book, app, or tutorial. Try a lot of them, stick with a pair, and consult others from time to time.
During my stay here, I took piano lessons and drawing lessons . I searched for the best memory apps , best Rubik’s cube solving apps . And each time, I learned best by jumping between different teaching methods. You will too.
You will find what you like about this skill
For example, “playing the guitar” is a broad skill, and you may not yet know if you want to sound like Joey Ramone, Carol King, or Vampire Weekend. You may think you want to learn your favorite rock song first, but you will find that it is actually much more enjoyable to learn the chords one by one. Or do it throughout the day before returning to approach song after song.
Concepts will click for you
Much of the training involves building mental models and diagrams : color wheel, food pyramid, sheet music, flowchart, story outline. It can include mnemonics, rules of thumb, and all sorts of concepts besides the raw information you learn to process. Each teaching method will use a different combination or presentation of these concepts, and some presentations will be more user-friendly than others.
For example, solving a Rubik’s cube requires some abstract concepts and complex spatial reasoning. Some of the basic movements were not interesting to me until I saw how they are explained in five different ways in five different applications. It was only then that I learned how I prefer to think about these moves and choose the application that followed them.
You won’t give up so easily
Every few years I try to learn how to program. As a child, I used the book “For Dummies” and a couple of BASIC books. As an adult, I tried several online courses. Every time I give up when I’m a little upset. And then, a few months later, I run into a problem that coding can solve, and I would like to stay with it.
There are so many ways to learn to program that I would never exhaust them. And if I’m really serious about this, I should try about ten of them at once. Because when I get into an unpleasant part of one lesson, I can move on to another and another until I have accumulated enough skills to cope with the first one again. It’s the same when I’m bored – I can find a more fun method that seems like a break but still teaches me.
He fills in the blanks
No teacher or study guide can cover all acceptable ways of learning a subject. The Accurate Classical Piano Guide will not teach you jazz. Strunk & White cannot teach you how to write a vivid fantasy novel. Bob Ross can’t get you to the Guggenheim.
If you want to take a skill seriously, you must have more than one influence. You have to be ready for new challenges, you have to find your own voice, you have to adapt to additional difficulties that your main teacher may not foresee.
You may also need to discover biases or flaws in your teachers. Any topic worth exploring is also controversial, and you should be aware of the different points of view, whether you agree with them or not. You may end up changing your mind (take this from a former Christian creationist conservative who read several library books and went online). You can reinforce your point of view or synthesize a new one instead of repeating what you have been taught.
In my two and a half years at Lifehacker, I was lucky to be paid tuition fees. I will not stop studying now. I hope you don’t do that either.