The State of Learning
Sometimes I’ve wondered if people are getting stupider.
We have a collision of events…technology that does everything for us. I’m sure there are some people who don’t have a good grasp of grammar because…why bother? The AI will do it for you.
Big universities are in trouble according an article in the Wall Street Journal. They charge a fortune and the degree doesn’t mean what it used to. Some people don’t even pay attention to the education as long as they get the certificate.
Learning itself feels superficial, almost since online learning showed up. There, the instructor doesn’t have to engage with the students. It’s challenging even in a live online environment to ask questions, or question the instructor on a point. A guru who taught an expensive online class stated on Twitter that he was willing to discuss the topic with his followers…as long as they agreed with him. Learning is processing all the information (I dislike the phrase distill) and then forming your own opinions. You should always disagree with some elements of what an expert says and understand why you disagree. (This is different than a beginner stamping their foot and saying, “I don’t like this and you can’t make me do this.”)
I’ve done the online learning for the day job for a number of years. I’m sure many companies have gone to that because it’s cheaper than spending a couple of grand and TDY money to send the person to a day class (which I’ve also done). The day class was so packed with information I was exhausted. The online learning was an hour. The early ones focused on a narrow subject and had fifteen minute modules. Now? The classes are 30 minutes and the modules 5 minutes. Obviously a sign of short attention spans, but it hardly allows for much depth.
The Learner in me feels very unsatisfied by this. It feels more like I’m checking a box than actual getting any information to think about. Contrast that to reading the book Unsupervised, which is on artificial intelligence. I had to stop reading because I needed the time to process what I was reading.
Writing craft has suffered as well. The beginners are taught the rules, but those are very basic. You might find an online workshop for two hours on how to write a novel, an extremely broad topic. Or, like the upcoming Romance online conference for ProWriting Aid, it’ll be a lot of classes where the instructor is selling something. While I don’t have any problems with writers making money, those feel like infomercials and some aren’t honest about the purpose.
There are advanced classes out there. However, I can count the number of instructors on one hand and have plenty of fingers left over. This makes what we learn entirely their opinions.
An example: One instructor states that humor is hard to do. It’s a generalization, perhaps true for most writers.
But.
It’s easy for me to do, and fun. Most of my publishing successes have been humorous stories. My Dice Ford series is humorous, and I’ve done some with my GALCOM series. The skill comes from my #4 Adaptability. That strength is also good at another skill: Writing in present tense.
During the Great Challenge I wrote some short stories in present tense because that was the way they felt like they wanted to be written. I’m debating doing a novel like that because it would be a fun challenge. But present tense is generally discouraged because it’s hard to do well, or from personal opinion of the writer. If you have only one or two experts teaching everything, what would you do if you wanted to learn more about writing present tense and they said not to do it?
This is why I want to see diversity of writing opinions. It’s too easy to fall into personal preferences. And I get that some writers will try something and it won’t work, like present tense. I read one book years ago and it threw me out because it was in present tense. The writer hadn’t done it well (at the time, it was trendy). But I also read Ruby Dixon’s Ice Planet Barbarians and thoroughly enjoyed it…and that series is in present tense. I didn’t notice for a while because she executed it well.
But also, someone may fill in a gap that I didn’t know was missing. When I was in high school, I had to take the required Basic Algebra class. The teacher got up in front of the class, his chalk slashing out formulas on the chalkboard. I saw x and y and was confused by it. He went through everything so fast that I couldn’t process it.
So I asked a family member who was a math guy who talks about solving the hardest math problems. He walked me through the problems, and I checked the answers in the back of the book. Got them all right.
When I got the paper back, there were red slashes through every single problem. I’d gotten them all wrong!
We went back and forth the entire semester, with the math expert helping me, me checking the answers in the back, and the teacher marking them as wrong. The math expert thought the teacher wasn’t teaching it very well (that turned out to be true, but the same problem existed with the expert). We met with the teacher at school, who I felt like now blew it off. To him, I was either lazy, or stupid, or just bothering not to learn the lessons.
At the end of the very long semester, I got in a D in the class, probably because the teacher didn’t want me repeating the class with him.
Time traveling forward some twenty plus years, I’m roaming around the internet and stumble into a site discussing algebra. Bing! Two things jumped out at me, and I realized I hadn’t known them…but both were important:
The formula to get the answer is the goal.
The format of the formula was important.
Until the class, all my math classes had focused only on the answer, so I had kept thinking the answer was the goal. And the teacher had just scrawled the formula across the board and expected everyone to grasp that he wanted the problems to look exactly like that. Then I asked the math expert, who is a maverick when it comes to anything like that (having done homework he despised in a sonnet). Though he helped and I did the formulas, it was apparent years later they hadn’t exactly fit what the teacher wanted.
The teacher could have said the formula requirement in class. I don’t remember. But he drove through everything so fast that I had little time to process anything. And he never told me what I was doing wrong. Part of me gets that teachers have too much on their plates to spend too much time with students, but part of me wonders why he couldn’t have said I wasn’t following the exact formula he wanted. Surely, that would have taken less time than grading all my papers wrong.
More likely, he never even thought I was missing those two pieces of information. To him, they were obvious.
Online learning makes this extremely challenging because it’s a lot harder to ask questions when we’re confused.
Another issue that comes into play is that we all learn differently, and at different paces. The time we have available is sometimes limited, especially with Sunday Writers.
But there’s also an ugly piece behind all this: The assumption that all learning should have a goal.
The evil word: goal. At least for me, the goalless person.
But goal sets up an expectation that it has to be for something specific and measurable (the evil metrics). The implication is that you will immediately see benefits from the learning. You could probably do that with a Microsoft Excel class.
Writing craft?
It might take years of practicing to understand something you’ve learned, especially with the more advanced skills. Very little is an actionable task you can do with instant results. None of it measurable.
And people now have short attention spans because of cell phones and technology. They expect the tools to do things for them and identify if they’ve accomplished their goals.
What does this do to something like writing that requires long term learning for mastery? And how do we overcome it?
Some things to think about.
