I’ve got a complicated set of feelings when it comes to learning. I dislike the idea of “tricks and tips” and my early encounters with people trying to teach me how to learn all had this “life hack” flavour to them. We had a huge push of Edward de Bono‘s methods when I was in high school, making mind maps and trying to explain “how the brain worked”. But many of these techniques felt unnatural to me. The advice to make humorous or extreme pictures to remember things just makes me feel silly. And I never derived the joy de Bono talks about from making mind maps. It felt performative. And we never covered spaced repetition and real scientific studies of memory.
I bounced off supplementary mathematics classes where it seemed like they were just teaching to the test, and I felt infantalised by the upbeat smiling faces and cartoons in the notes. I felt myself more serious than that.
So, I entered university having rejected many good practices and worked through my whole academic career with a system that worked for me but failed in spectacular ways every now and again.
I fell victim to a common problem of mistaking the sense of familiarity with real retention. I read and re-read textbooks and knew intimately the pain of being able to picture the exact place in my book where the knowledge I needed in the exam was but not being able to recall it.
I failed organic chemistry twice because I didn’t consider using old exams as learning.
Later, as a lecturer, I gave my students poor advice, because I didn’t understand the mechanics of learning that well, even as I was trying to put things together by reading books like How people learn.
On the other hand I had an obsession with application which at least seemed to make up for my deep disdain for doing the exercises in textbooks. As a student I would do a lot of re-summarisation of subjects I enjoyed and I would spend many hours programming implementations of algorithms into my calculator or computer. I would also try to apply methods to solving problems in my own life.
Later as a lecturer I re-implemented almost everything in my courses using computer methods. Excel, Matlab, Octave, Python.
These applications cemented my knowledge in ways that are hard through theory alone.
The thought that started this post was a common issue I had when I mention new tools to people – they will say “when I have a few weeks open, I’ll learn Python” or whatever the tool is I’m talking about. But I believe that you learn better by trying to solve a real problem with the tools you have. I’ve found I often break even with the time I would have spent if the tool is good. In fact, I’ve often used that as the mark of an excellent tool, it pays you back for learning it in the first use.
Perhaps my issues with these learning techniques is that the payoff is much longer. It’s hard going to start a spaced repitition schedule and stick with it, and you’re not learning any faster, in fact you’re slowing things down! As I’ve grown older I’ve started appreciating the slow wins, too, and perhaps noticing that my daily practice of trying problems with different tools and exploring new methods is also a slow burn rather than an immediate win.
Now I’m using LLMs all the time to produce code, and I’m trying to figure out the line between learning how to use these tools better and re-investing on learning my existing ones or new ones like Javascript and front-end. I’m constantly needing to remind myself to keep learning without being distracted by outputs.
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