How to Learn Everything: The MasterClass Diaries

On the other hand, my university was in the habit of using the best professors to teach the intro / first year courses. Because those are the courses where you tend to lose the most of your students.

It’s edutainment. They select top celebrities to teach to the widest possible audience and maximize profit.

Sometimes the celebrities are good teachers, most of the time not.

I 100% get what you're saying.

I guess where I differ is, I've been cooking food my entire life. Most of it sucks. I still eat it. But if you were to ask me how to make one of the foods I cook any better I really wouldn't even know where to start.

However, if I picked up one of the those books, all of a sudden I would start to understand how meat cooks, the different ways you can tweak the process, and how to achieve the best results.

From there, I would be prepared to actually start cooking well. But without reading, I would still be shooting in the dark with the same terrible dishes I've been cooking terribly for decades.

I think it depends on the thing learned.

In dance it's pretty important to learn the basics well from day one. If you learn wrong technique it worms its way into your muscle memory and is difficult to unlearn and replace with something else. (It's also why the most basic dance classes ought to be taught by expert teachers, but that's another hobbyhorse.) And bad technique can lead to injury.

Other fields don't necessarily have a "correct" way, or they do but it's comparatively easy to replace a mistake once we notice it. In some cases, making a mistake and then correcting it can actually fix the right way to do it in one's memory. (Think of embarrassing mistakes we sometimes make when trying to speak a foreign language!)

It actually serves as a nice contrast in some ways. Compare the article’s description of the experience of going through the classes with the takeaways from a sample of the wiki entries.

The real benefit of having true experts teach something is all the tacit knowledge you get from hearing how they think about and approach their craft, not the explicit instructions they might give.

> theft of another company's intellectual property

Seriously? "Theft"? Most of these millionaire 'celebrities' teaching on Masterclass are from the USA, which is the 'king' of 'intellectual property.

The 'intellectual property' system, by driving artificial scarcity of information, is the root cause for global heating and social inequity. Imagine if everything was open source and we'd have Open Value Networks that measure actual material flows, instead of a 'medium-of-exchange' that is backed and enforced by the military-industrial-complex.

We need Commons-based peer production and Protocol Cooperativism, and the end of Rentier Capitalism, through the use of MetaCurrency's distributed computing pattern (Holographic chain). We need it now.

According to this person there is plenty of research saying you should tell them how to do it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1ib43q3uXQ

I think she makes a good point. We don't hand people a guitar and say "figure it out on your own". Cooking shows don't generally show the final dish and say "if you want to make this yourself figure it out on your own".

You might say computer programming is different but I suspect for most people here you were taught things like sorting algorithms, database queries, lexers and parsing algorithms, etc. You were not made to figure them on your own. Sure maybe you were self motivated and looked up the topics by yourself but likely you mostly learned by looking at existing code and over time figured out how to see what it was doing and how to modify it or apply the same ideas.

From someone versed in teaching, here's my unsolicited analysis of your teaching:

On the spectrum from direct instruction (I tell you/show you what to do) to inquiry (I set up a situation for you to use some of your prior knowledge to learn something new) it sounds like you leaned towards inquiry here.

You experienced the power of this yourself when you were younger so it's no surprise it informed how you chose to help/not help.

You used a mix of collaborative and cognitive questioning to both engage the learner in the problem and help them think through it. ------------------------

Next I'd like to ask you some questions to help you think through two important teaching concepts: 1) Productive struggle 2) Feedback

Was the student at a complete loss with what to do? Given time to take a break, maybe even sleep, and revisit the problem, do you think they still would have been at a loss?

If no, then give them time and space to think through it on their own or use cognitive questioning as you did to help them think through it.

This gets us to the concept of productive struggle. It is just as the name sounds. This concept has well researched benefits for learners.

If the student had no idea what to do and you suspect would merely get frustrated then that's struggling and its not productive. It's the kind of situation that leads to poor first order outcomes and has second order outcomes like making someone hate the thing you are trying to help them learn.

In that event it would be best to either help them through the problem with advice or find a different problem for them to work on that they have enough prior knowledge to productively struggle with.

Next up is feedback...

Did the student get any feedback after they made their choice? If it was programming could they run their code and see if it worked? Was it a binary right/wrong?

If it didn't work did the student have enough prior knowledge to work around any roadblocks they might encounter?

These questions take us back to the concept of productive struggle.

1) productive struggle is good 2) feedback or advice should be timely and based on what a learner needs to keep them from struggling unproductively

There are related ideas...some lessons you may have a focus and so you tell the student certain things that aren't the focus of the lesson instead of putting them in an inquiry situation. This is another skill needed for effective teaching: creating, selecting, and sequencing a curriculum.

Implied in all of this is the importance of knowing the content, how you want to teach, your learner's prior knowledge, and how they are reacting to the problem.

I've been lucky (not really, keep reading) enough to take a few classes with professors who are probably the best in the world at what they do and found them really awful. You could tell they didn't want to be there and didn't really give a shit about anyone learning anything. Moreover, I think being really good at something makes it harder to teach, not easier. TAs are usually much better teachers. After all, they can still remember what it was like to not understand the material.

Some of the best teachers I've had were at a community college, actually. I ended up taking community college classes for a couple years instead of going to high school and had a much better experience than at the "real" college I attended when I was older. That could have been a function of age though (by the time I went to a real college I was much more interested in girls and partying than learning anything).

I didn't have space for this in the essay, but the mechanical egg also plays "The Final Countdown" when the eggs are supposed to be hard boiled.

It's honestly not a great way to cook eggs, but don't underestimate the joy of hearing those opening notes in the morning...

Cute!

How do you say you don’t like a video/post/tweet without reading/watching those videos/posts/tweets?

Yes there’s a lot more academic fields than the “hard” sciences and vocational stuff, add them to the list too. That was not a treatise on teachability/learnability of a subject.

I seriously didn’t get your point, you thought of being sarcastic and bitter because I ranted about how I disliked VCs and Productivity gurus? Thanks, got your point, be well.

Seriously? You put on a 25 minute timer every time you sit for work? Dude, I know I shouldn’t have generalised, but tell me that these things are anything but homeopathy of the mindset problem? I understand that these things can be reassuring/calming/satisfying but so can be the superstitious rituals in religion or the words of a healer, do we not condemn those when we see the fraudulent nature in them. I’ve seen with my eyes how these guys concoct stuff they call productivity hacks right out of their a and slap a polished 4K video to sell it.

I understand that all our wants differ, For instance I only want to have a decent grasp over software engineering to sustain a livelihood, but even if I wanted to master all of computer science, I don’t know if I would equate using a timer(pomodoro) or recalling the answer without looking at the answer(active recall) to mastering compiler design. I don’t about you, but to recall the answer without looking at the answer while preparing for a test or studying for a stipulated time before losing focus didn’t need a overly sophisticated term at least up until a couple years ago. Most of us did pretty well through our schools and colleges. What is this all of a sudden now, if not money grabbing, avarice, charlatanry, fraudulence? In fact, I would’ve conceded if the benefits of these sophistication were extraordinary, they are not even marginal. Anyway man, be well:)