Learning Styles --- Part 1

Can I change my style? Can I improve my style? Can I learn or acquire a new style? Which style is best for what learning task? Don't ask a good question. Because scholars, researchers, book writer usually leave them for you yourself to answer!

What Styles Are There?

1. Left-brained, right-brained?
2. Prefer to see, hear or do?visual,auditory,reading/writing-preference,
   kinesthetic/tactile?
3. Deep vs surface
4. Holistic/Integrative vs atomistic/itemized
5. Single/alone vs team/social/cooperative learning
6. Converger,Diverger,Assimilator,Accommodator
7. Field Dependent or Independent
8. Concrete or Abstract

"What is my style?"
"Do we have more than one style?"
"Can I change my style?"
"Can I improve my style?"
"Can I learn or acquire a new style?"
"Which style is best for what task?"

As I have warned you before,  you yourself will have to to answer these very good, and useful questions.

We'll come up with more help in later posts on this blog.

Stay Cool with Calculus - Part 1

Some time in August 2012, or earlier.

I wanted to teach my Primary 5 son some Calculus. He's not a nerd and I didn't know Calculus myself. We were doing it just to test how cool he can be in the face of  some supposedly "scary" problems.

My purpose was clear: just 2 or 3 inspiring real-life problems, 2 or 3 simple formulas or procedures, just 1 or 2 hours.

I had read about how Calculus can be used to calculate optimum prices etc. I had also read about Einstein's gratitude to his childhood textbooks: simple, easy, general, introductory, user-friendly, kid-friendly, (in his hand-written translated diary, to be accurate.)

Many outsiders realize it can be beautiful and desire to see its beauty with their own eyes:








That is taken from "Calculus Made Easy" The 1998 Edition's introduction by Martin Gardner

Can you find such a book easily in our modern days? Excluding the Khan Academy or any online stuffs.

How to Be Lucky in Your Study

A few weeks back, I seemed to be in a winning streak; all my programming projects got done without any major glitch. I was not that lucky with programming before, and thus I happened to become more self-aware: I kept asking, "What's happening? What was I thinking? What belief underlay this action of mine?" etc.

The following is a list of my thoughts that I managed to gather in those luck breaks:

1. "It doesn't matter." Here I'm dismissing a failure on my part, instead of feeling guilty or shameful or desperate. Then, I found that it really did not matter because I could find a work-around or I found I could solve it later or I found I didn't have to solve it at all.
2. "There's time, I'll learn it tomorrow."
3. "There must be a better book or approach, I'll find it soon."
4. "I'll do it my way, I'll invent, conjure up, cook up some funny solution that however works!"
5.  "There's nothing in the books or on Internet for this problem. It's for me to fill this gap in human knowledge. Since I'm first, whatever I do is automatically better than Zero/Nil/Zilch etc."
6. "I cannot solve this. But no one has solved it either. So no one has advantage over me."
7. "This is a wrong problem to solve. Anyone who tries to solve this will get bogged down, tied down, and suffer."
8. "I have no clue. I'll bluff my best and move on."
9. "I have no clue. I even don't know how to bluff. I will switch my brains and do blind, purely random variations."
10. "I'll give up and move onto what works. Will import what works."

One size doesn't fit all, of course. Such thoughts may not even work for me in a different context.

Yet the results, I noticed, were so good that I must remember to give them a try any time I encounter a hard nut to crack.

JIT Learning, Kid Learning

Peter Small, in Entrepreneurial Web, marvels at how his average-nerd or non-nerd son acquired skills to use a presentation software without his help, without reading manuals, or without any special training or courses. You too may have noticed how quickly your kids master their smartphones in no time!

He then generalizes this observation to how modern kids are coping with the complexity of their modern, gadget-filled world. He theorizes that this is the way for adults too to live with the complexity of today's technologies.

In a previous section in the book, he relates how in his youth in the post-War Britain, he and a few young men were thrown into the deep end to find their way around in the world of science, technology and engineering. That experience convinced him that JIT (Just in Time) learning is the right way to master a complex array of challenging subjects, and that a small amount of knowledge can help you realize an impressive, sophisticated goal.

I'd also recommend hands-on, immersive learning especially with science and technology.

JIT learning, or Kid learning is cool. Cool because you don't stress yourself out with unnecessary theoretical conjectures and wild goose chases. And because you get your feedback and validation at every post along the way.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance has also depicted how cool a Buddha would be with the innards of modern motorcycle engines.

So next time when you need to reset your smartphone's date format or email spam filters, etc, remember to behave like a kid.

Stay cool. Just do it. Get your hands dirty.

Above all else, go incremental, take baby steps, and dont' forget to have fun along the way.