Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar by James Marcus Bach

Author:James Marcus Bach
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2009-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

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Cyclic learning means that I can study stuff, fail to understand it —and still call it successful learning! But how can “failing to understand” be successful learning? Several ways:

There is progress in failure. There’s a huge difference between not knowing about something that I’ve never looked at, and not knowing about something I have looked at. Just looking at it is progress, because my ignorance now has a focus. Instead of “I don’t know anything about meteorology,” my self-assessment becomes, “I don’t yet know the difference between a hectopascal and a millibar” along with fifty other specific ignorances. Failing to learn may be successful scouting.

Learning in my sleep. My unconscious mind is like a digestive enzyme that sets to work on objects of confusion. Eating away, eating away. My mind is slow sometimes, but so relentless. Mysteries cannot be left alone. Puzzles must be solved.

Inspiring people to help. If I ask for help from experts, they will be more likely to assist if they see that I’ve already tried to learn for myself.

Helping people learn. If other people are working with me as I learn, perhaps seeing me fail to understand will help them understand the subject better, or in a new way. A teacher seeing me struggle may be inspired to produce a fresh example or a new teaching activity.

Delayed action learning. What confuses me now may become powerful knowledge in retrospect, even years later, when some new fact or problem arises. We’re used to this from mystery stories, right? We encounter clues. We don’t know what the clues mean, at first. But we may learn about a new bit of evidence that explains all those clues. A detective must hold confusion patiently in mind, to solve the crime.

Rethinking my expectations: Perhaps I am expecting too much from myself. Perhaps I’m expecting the wrong things. Maybe my failure is just an artifact of focusing on the wrong things. Failure challenges me to rethink what success might be.

My puzzle, fragment, or failure could be someone else’s solution. This is powerful, because it means that cyclic learning can span the minds of many thinkers.

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