Adult learning
Our tutoring consultant offers some comments based on his experience as a teacher and as a learner.
One of our correspondents recently posted a number of questions about adult learning, also known as lifelong learning; that is, what happens after you leave school. We’ve made some comments previously, but in response to the recent post our tutor put together some of his own observations:
First: unless you’re going for a formal qualification, with grades and evaluations set by the program, the only judge of whether you’ve learned what you set out to learn is you. This demands a high level of intellectual honesty. Without the chapter test written and graded by your teacher, it’s all too easy to say, “Yes, I know that conjugation,” when in fact you’d be hard-pressed to write it out correctly.
Next: what is your aim in learning? I don’t want to imply you have to have a formal program but I think it helps to be clear about what you want to do. As one example: you’re just curious. Having been dragged through the Henry IV plays in school, you’re pretty confused about who did what in the Wars of the Roses, and you’d just like to sort it out. Another: you have a project, and you’ve identified a tool you can use. Say you want to transform a picture into part-color and part-monochrome. You dive into Photoshop, ignoring the edge-sharpening and raw file conversion lessons, and find the technique you need. (Here it’s easy to tell whether you’ve succeeded in your aim.) A third: for want of a better term, you’re determined on assimilating a subject. If you want to learn (more realistically, make progress in) a foreign language, your approach needs to be different from the first two examples and your criteria for success take more thought to set out.
Perhaps most important: how do you learn? What is your style? Do you absorb best from books, videos, lectures, conversations? (Most people do better with a variety.) A particular subject will work better in some media than others, but your own characteristics are important. And with the medium chosen, how do you work best? I find that, for foreign languages especially, it takes me twenty minutes of work until my mind is fully in the environment and I can make serious progress, so I block out at least an hour. On the other hand, my tutoring colleague B. can concentrate on one subject for no more than about twenty minutes before having to switch. If you find you’re not making much progress, try changing the setup of your program.
With these answers in hand, you can think about scheduling and commitment. Subjects like math and languages build on themselves. If you go too long between sessions you’ll forget things, and having to relearn is discouraging. For these, and for most subjects, half an hour every other day is more effective than a full morning at the weekend. Can you commit to the schedule you need to follow? (How to keep motivated is another subject entirely, needing an essay at least as long as this one.)
By this time, you should have some idea of how many different learning-areas you can handle at once. It may be just one.
Finally: people forget. It is normal to master a lesson, then if you don’t review or use it for a couple of weeks, it fades and you may not be able to do it again. This is discouraging. But relearning takes a shorter time, and fixes the material more firmly. It goes better the second time around. Patience and tenacity work wonders.
