Well said, though I spent longer than I should have trying to parse whether “Our sports champion haven’t forgotten how to maintain a health casual workout regiment, they never knew how to do it nor did the thought cross their mind.” implied singular or plural “they”.
From my own experiences teaching recently-learned vs long-ago-learned topics, I agree with what you’re saying about learning from oneself-in-2weeks being near optimal in the sense of most rapidly onboarding you to a particular skill.
However, I still find a lot of value in a process that involves input about what to learn from people who are 1 or 5 or 10 or 20 years advanced from oneself. I find that people who’ve been following what’s state-of-the-art in a particular field for years or decades tend to notice trends and ask good questions about them in a very different way from how beginners do. As a concrete example, I’ve had an industry-veteran boss insist on branding a project I did while in school with buzzwords that neither I nor the other students were aware of, because he saw interest in those topics growing in the industry, and a few years later I was fighting off recruiters who had been tasked with finding candidates with established backgrounds in those buzzwords. Since part of my goal with that school project was to build my resume and improve my job prospects, the nudge toward more corporate-appealing branding from one of those “best in field” types was instrumental in the project’s success.
In other words, I think a “good teacher” has both recent recollection of what it was like to not know, and also a huge corpus of experience from which they can draw trends and predict things about altering the work’s direction or details to maximize desired results. Since those traits are nearly impossible to get in a single person, one can get to the target learning experience by learning from several people simultaneously, seeking from each what that person is particularly well suited to offer.
Well said, though I spent longer than I should have trying to parse whether “Our sports champion haven’t forgotten how to maintain a health casual workout regiment, they never knew how to do it nor did the thought cross their mind.” implied singular or plural “they”.
From my own experiences teaching recently-learned vs long-ago-learned topics, I agree with what you’re saying about learning from oneself-in-2weeks being near optimal in the sense of most rapidly onboarding you to a particular skill.
However, I still find a lot of value in a process that involves input about what to learn from people who are 1 or 5 or 10 or 20 years advanced from oneself. I find that people who’ve been following what’s state-of-the-art in a particular field for years or decades tend to notice trends and ask good questions about them in a very different way from how beginners do. As a concrete example, I’ve had an industry-veteran boss insist on branding a project I did while in school with buzzwords that neither I nor the other students were aware of, because he saw interest in those topics growing in the industry, and a few years later I was fighting off recruiters who had been tasked with finding candidates with established backgrounds in those buzzwords. Since part of my goal with that school project was to build my resume and improve my job prospects, the nudge toward more corporate-appealing branding from one of those “best in field” types was instrumental in the project’s success.
In other words, I think a “good teacher” has both recent recollection of what it was like to not know, and also a huge corpus of experience from which they can draw trends and predict things about altering the work’s direction or details to maximize desired results. Since those traits are nearly impossible to get in a single person, one can get to the target learning experience by learning from several people simultaneously, seeking from each what that person is particularly well suited to offer.