Living-Learning and Teaching

This is a deeper dig into the list that I had created for my article titled: Do Something Every Day. https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2020/11/living-do-something-everyday.html

Ever since I was young, my parents and my culture had instilled a sense of respect for learning. Even though the dominant pedagogical philosophy in Taiwan was of the cram and memorize in school, I learned more by asking Why? What if? And How? questions. In fact, when my family moved to Honduras, one of the new family friends there would shake his head at how often Why? came out of my mouth.

It was a natural habit that follows me today, although the persistent question asking has been tempered by circumspection and patience.

The joy of learning and the pride in knowing is a part of my genetics, it is my raison d’etre. I realized this fact about myself late in life, much after I had set my life on a path which was expected of me: to chase after the brass ring.  Our society does not hold the idea of knowledge for the sake of knowledge in high regard. My pursuit of broad knowledge is considered by society as living as a jack of all trades but master of none, which is considered a pejorative in our society because  of society’s need for its workers to specialize and concentrate on narrow bailiwicks and serve as replaceable cogs in the production machine supersedes society’s desire to have people who knew knowledge for the sake of knowledge.   

I have instead started telling people that I am a polymath in training because I felt I needed to disguise my joy in pursuing my catholic span of interests. Saying that you are training to become a polymath is slightly more respectable than being a jack of all trades; at the least the term polymath will send people off to Google before they can denigrate the idea. As I became fascinated with the idea of the polymath, I have come to appreciate the implications of being a polymath. There is even a book espousing the many merits of a polymath (Ahmed 2019), or in David Epstein’s book on generalist.  (Epstein 2019)

It may have started out as a snarky retort, but this has become my purpose in life and my destiny: to know something about everything and everything about something.

In the ever-pragmatic reality in which we exist, the societal norm is to treat knowledge as salable commodities. This attitude narrowly define knowledge as either being  immediately applicable or as the basis for creating new knowledge from the foundation of the old knowledge. All to advance human progress. This was especially true in my chosen profession of engineering. We were judged as either as applied, real-world engineers; or as theoretical and impractical researchers.

Teaching is an obvious third option, but it is held as a very non-glamourous, non-celebrated third option. Society views teaching as necessary but non-value-added proposition for passing on the knowledge to the future workforce. Even though many researchers inhabit the hallowed hall of academia, their worth is determined narrowly by their originality and ability to break new grounds in their niche subjects.  The teaching part of their profession has rarely been celebrated as a standalone achievement, only as a companion, a complementary function that is secondary to the innovation and creative endeavors of the researcher. There have been good, if not great teachers amongst the great innovators, but the brilliance of their pedagogical prowess are seen merely as a bonus rather than as a primary endeavor.

As I worked my way through the usual career of an engineer with a doctorate, I found myself drawn to the teaching function as I got older. My gift, I realized, was not in applying the knowledge, or creating new knowledge; instead, my gift was in my ability to communicate knowledge to others. As I look back at my career as an engineer, I was never happier than when I was doing research, to learn, and then to teach.  I did get a thrill while applying my knowledge, at witnessing a design evolve into a product, or investigating the unexplored territories of engineering, creating something new and heretofore unknown; it is just that the thrill of connecting with another human while sparking their minds gave me bigger and more thrilling thrills.

I decided to make the learning something new every day and teaching someone something every day the central tenets in my daily list of habits. Habits that I hope to internalize. Habits that will  be my wu-wei behavior: doing without knowing, action without thought, impulse rather than intent. Make learning and teaching a deeply integrated part of my being. So it is that I train myself to do it everyday.

Works Cited

Ahmed, Waqas. The Polymath: Unlocking the Power of Human Versatility. New York City: John Wiley, 2019.

Epstein, David. Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. New York: Riverhead Books, 2019.

 

 

Book Review-How Learning Works 7 Research Based Principles for Smart Teaching. Ambrose, Bridges, DiPietro, Lovett, and Norman

This book is a part of a series from Jossy-Bass Higher and Adult Education series. I bought it on the recommendation of the learning resources center staff. They presented parts of the material during their new staff orientation.

I had two intentions, one was to have some resources at my disposal for the latest pedagogical theories to help my teaching and I also wanted to learn about these research based principles to help my coaching.

The structure of the book is straightforward, the introduction laid out the seven principles and stated their purpose: to bridge the research and teaching practices. The succeeding seven chapters laid out the seven principles, gave scenarios for the readers to digest and analyze. They discussed the theory and experimental results that supports each argument within the principles. The last section is a conclusion that reiterates the principles to close out the book. They have also included the eight tools that they have cited in the body of the book in the appendices to help the reader learn more about the implementation and pitfalls associated with these tools.

I found the presentations workmanlike, which is as intended. The idea is to present the principles cogently and logically, even though the topics that are covered are anything but coldly rational.

I was personally very interested in how students develop mastery and how they can become self-directed learners. Those two chapters drew me in when I first looked at the table of contents. As I read the book in the sequences presented by the author I was drawn into other principles, specifically, the chapters on how the student’s prior knowledge affected their learning and how they organized their knowledge made them look at the knowledge that they are accruing really made me think about those topics. I knew that those topics affect the students learning but I was not clever enough to see how teachers can incorporate tools to help the students deal with their lack of prior knowledge and how much the knowledge organization affect their learning process. Indeed, I started to think about my own learning process, and how ineffective some of my learning habits are, and yet I continue to persist in pursuing the same methods.  I am changing my ways in response to that lesson.

The chapter on how the practice and the kind of feedback help the student to learn is enlightening because it gives me ideas on how to change my usual teaching tools to make the experience more productive for my students. The feedback topic is an important one and it is here that I received a lot of reassurance that the feedback skills that I have employed in my teaching and coaching are good practices and that my instincts were good ones. I did also profit from gaining more understanding of how feedback can be used.

The chapter on motivation and course climate were difficult ones for me, I took for granted that the motivation for the students are their responsibilities, that they were taking the class or playing on a team for a reason, that they were thusly motivated and I would have something to do with that, but not a lot. I am still a bit skeptical. I feel that motivation should be a personal decision, while I, as the teacher, can help them get more motivated by being a great teacher and being fair in my assessment of their abilities, I didn’t feel that I can make that much difference in how they are motivated. I am still dubious.

On the topic of the course climate, I can see where this chapter would be very useful and very pertinent in a social science class. I am in engineering so that we don’t have too much social discussions. I do see where the social climate of a class can make or break the classroom success of the students by how the class interacts socially and the kind of expectations that they the students and me the teacher would have due to the social constructs, societal norms  and stereotypes that are realities in our society. Those issues really speak to the kind of person the teachers are and how their root beliefs guide them in their daily interaction with the students. Knowing that the effect on the students is an important part of opening the teacher’s eyes to the reality that they face but I m dubious about how they can transform their teaching according to this principle without completely changing their world view.

I will be referring back to this book often as I go forth in continuation of my teaching career. The principles are somewhat commonsensical, which makes it so much more acceptable.  The no-nonsense layout of the arguments and methods are very welcome. The magical thing about the book is that it gives practical advice while also providing the readers with enough untethered hooks to hang onto intellectually so that they are challenged. This gives the readers some degrees of freedom to reflect on the ideas and allows them to progress the principles forward in their own ways.