I would like to know of a community where I can post things that I write to myself. I’m not capable enough to make my own community yet, and I’ve got a lot to say.
My question, though, is about learning. What’s your single most essential defining piece of advice, to share the love of learning? To make someone who isn’t interested, interested?
Other than necessity, I guess. I hope that doesn’t just answer the question.
You can’t make someone interested in learning. You can investigate what excites someone and foster that excitement. You can also show your excitement and hope it’s contagious. But, sometime it’s not.
What about your self, though? How do you know when you’re being “contagious to yourself?” Is that nonsensical?
I don’t think it’s nonsensical :)
There’s a certain level of fake it till you make it, or even “gaslighting yourself” that you can do. Sometimes pretending that you’re interested in something (and actively trying to justify it for yourself) is enough to make you grow interest. You can also look for the aspects of the topic that interest you to motivate you to learn the bits that aren’t, with the logic that you can’t get better at the interesting bit without also learning the less interesting bit.
Other times, especially if you have a choice to try something else, it’s better to try something else and see if you can get into it more easily
Learning for the sake of learning is nice, but sometimes it’s nice to learn for the sake of figuring something out.
So, try asking yourself an easy-to-ask question to which you don’t know the answer. Sleep on it. Come up with your own explanation. After a while you may find yourself itching to find out a “proper” answer. The best part is, a lot of questions aren’t completely answered. But you’ll have to do some learning to see which ones.
Yeah I really need an end goal. For example
I want to add solar panels to my house.
Well in researching that I have learned about electricity, solar panels, inverters, roofing, batteries etc…etc…
An interesting thing about learning random things is that the knowledge you acquire will come in handy in unexpected places.
For instance, I learned to play guitar. Then I wrote songs, then I wanted to record the songs to see if they were any good so I learned about recording so then I ended up in a band with other people and recorded a few albums with them, which didn’t go anywhere.
Not long after, people who were aware that I recorded music asked me to help out at a church and I got experience running live audio.
And eventually I moved away so I had to quit and then I ended up having a job where editing audio for training sessions was a part of my job responsibilities and my previous experience with recording albums and running live music prepared me to do a job that paid a hell of a lot more than I was making before which then advanced into another job and another job and all of these random little tidbits of information and skills that I’ve picked up along the way keep becoming crucial to my future successes in ways that I could have never anticipated back when I was learning them to record some dinky guitar.
When you’re passionate it radiates and sometimes it makes the subject more interesting for people who might not have otherwise paid attention.
This exactly. My favorite teachers throughout every level of education were first and foremost passionate about whatever it was they were teaching.
I had an absolute goober of a football coach as a teacher for an earth-science/physical science (blanking on what it was actually called) class in middle school. Coaches were required to be teachers, and every coach me or my friends had up till then was boring, even though they knew the material well, being middle-school level amd all.
But my science class that year was my favorite class I’d ever taken in school. Even though I’d already learned most of the material outside of school, I paid attention every single class because coach was genuinely interested in the topic, and you could tell. I remember when we had a unit over the geology and makeup of the earth, he was literally giddy the day we started it because he was planning on showing us the movie The Core at the end of the unit.
This underpaid coach and teacher had actually found the time to fight for a movie not approved for use, despite having a list of plenty of other media he could’ve shown. I remember that really impressing me too. You could tell he was excited about the lessons, and I can’t remember a single student who wasn’t interested in class discussions at some point.
Be interested, and genuine.
I’m not sure if you mean gearing yourself up for learning or inspiring others to learn, but my answer might be the same for both.
Analogies. They’re primarily how I learn and understand things, as well as how I try to convey things to others. Being able to connect some dots to what you already know, even if they’re vastly different ideas, really helps (me) solidify new information and find a driving force to uncover more.
It could just be my wiring, but I think a lot of how we understand the world is in the terms of our previous understanding. There’s a real possibility of misguided bias though, like knowing all about hammers so everything reminds you of nails.
Let them play. Give them the pieces and let them play with it for a long time before trying to do any guiding.
If you want deeper analysis, read almost anything about learning by https://sciences.social/@alfiekohn
He covers a lot about intrinsic motivation for learning.
