Inspired(ing) to learn

Mostly, this article is written for the student wanting to understand how to leverage inspired and uninspired instruction of a skill of their interest. It isn’t just for the university student, but the student of any new skill. In the university environment it is often the case that, aside from lectures held by a professor for a given class, tutorials are held by teaching assistants. It is rarely, if ever, understood by the student what should naturally be expected of these sessions, and what to do after, once the ball is in your court. Here I outline the expectations of each of these facets, and the approach and mindset I believe is best for approaching them.

Generally, during class time, the professor will introduce and cover concepts. The skill and will of the professor to deliver the concepts to you will vary, and thus your initial contact with the concepts will vary from extremely poor where you remain unaware even of the structure of the material itself, why it flows from one concept to the next, and why it is important, to extremely satisfactory, where you get the first glimmer of wonder because the message has hit home, and you become inspired to learn. Effectively the professor should be capable of nurturing in you a sort of spell under which you become automatically induced to look deeper into the material. Though most of us will have an implicit budding interest to start, the professor should water it to bloom. It is completely normal to leave a class, even with the best professor at the helm, without having completely understood the material. There are several reasons for this, and once you understand this point, you will start to see where the professor’s responsibility drops off, and yours begins.

As a human, and especially one born of this age, your attention span is likely dismal — thus you will miss parts of some-to-most explanations. The pace of the professor might be slower or faster than your mind can handle, and thus you simply cannot keep up in some direction in the speed of listening. You yourself may be a slow learner, and all this commotion of class clouds your thought process. You yourself may be a fast learner and wish to move ahead of the professor’s words. You may be fatigued and drop in-and-out of sleep. You may be hungry and think of food. You may be attracted to someone in class, and spend time staring at them. There are endless ways in which a student will fall off the lines of communication from the professor, and many ways a professor can lose their communication towards the student. Thus, understanding the implicit issues with the very interface of learning should tell you one thing: you need to finish the job.

Supposing the professor was intelligent enough (they should be) to inspire learning in you, there is another place to solidify material in the channels of your mind: the tutorial sections. Again here, and I must admit its dismal state, the experience of your tutorial sessions will depend on the skill and will of the teaching assistant(s) (TAs, for short). It is quite difficult to find even mildly inspiring teaching assistants; though I do know some. Teaching assistants are usually not native English speakers in our department and have difficulty conveying information and tone. We should understand their position and not mock them for it, because I know many of them and they make every effort to improve themselves. It is their training grounds for becoming better versions of themselves for the sake and their desire to work in this country. Hats off to them. With this aside, tutorial sessions are your second base for solidifying information that you learnt in a prior lecture given by the professor.

Here the sessions are generally more pragmatic, or in principle they should be, solving problems and making the subject matter clearer. If the concepts explained by the professor are at the bird’s eye view, the tutorial sessions should be no further, but in fact closer to the application of the material. This does not mean you must solve problems in these sessions, but that TAs can make much clearer concepts which you can apply, and perhaps were only understood at more abstract (blurry) levels in class. This is also a timeslot which the TA can use to inspire learning. This is my domain, at this age of 29. I use these slots to inspire learning in the minds of my students, because we should never solely rely on a single source, say the professor, to have done it. The idea is reinforcement from as many teaching agents as possible.

If these are the only two types of sessions offered by your class, you have now understood their roles, and thus it is time to understand yours. You have just been a passive receiver of 1 – 5 hours of material related to your class. This is called knowledge. It comes from reading, hearing, seeing, and essentially absorbing the information through your senses. Your body need rarely do anything in this state other than sit, move the neck and eyes, think intellectually, be whisked quickly through slides, raise questions that will go unanswered, and possibly (likely) kick away intruding thoughts and emotions. This is not wisdom, understanding, or experience, however these three last (which I consider the same, and will call wisdom) are what is required to gain TRUE KNOWLEDGE of a concept.

I cannot tell you the number of times a student who has studied material for the week enters a lab programming session, wishing to write and execute code, yet can not even begin a proper Java project in the IDE of their choosing. They cannot write and compile and run their own program for which they studied to write. This is the difference between knowledge and wisdom. To attain wisdom, you must interact deeply with the material. Ideally, the knowledge of your friend cannot be deeper than the knowledge of your spouse for whom you have developed a wisdom. Your friend is only seen once per week, or month, and subject matter of conversation is selective. With a spouse, it is deeper, more frequent, private, and is interacted with in more profound ways; thus you build a wisdom for that person. The same with material. If you do not become its acquaintance, know it like a spouse with whom you live, see it from all angles, the professor’s and TA’s feeble words would have been spent in vain, and you would be as experienced in the subject as you would watching a mountain on TV for the experience of a hike. If your passively gained knowledge through lectures and tutorial sessions is not experienced more deeply by you, very little will come of your understanding for the subject. Your grades, which you are so concerned about, will handle themselves without a single thought if you become a friend of the subject.

I do understand some may claim to “not be cut-out for this type of material.” This may be true, and the best way to prove it is that even becoming a friend of the subject is not enough for you to excel. In this case you will either squarely see that the subject matter does not compute for your particular character through constant failure despite your best (and honest) attempts at wisdom, or that it was a bullshit excuse, and you have succeeded in-and-with the wisdom, proving to yourself that you would have failed in anything you tried when it became difficult.

Even in the very best situation, where professors and TAs are of exceptional quality (all the best), you will still have to convert the passive knowledge to experienced wisdom. The quality of instruction will simply dictate HOW MUCH EFFORT you will have to put. Sometimes you will have to first feed yourself the knowledge that the instructors failed to dole out, other times it will simply be a matter of converting knowledge gained through lectures into wisdom; the ease of undertaking these transformations depends on the clarity of initial instruction while your WILL to expend energy in this process is linked mostly to your level of inspiration.

You can inspire yourself to learn, but we should be giving you that spark from the instruction-end. If we fail to inspire you to learn, this is your Moses-in-the-desert moment. You are now alone at the margins of your fate with the subject. You can decide to muster the energy and push yourself to a point of inspiration. This happens when you begin to uncover the mysteries of the material, much akin to one digging for treasure that, once caught the first glimmer of gold in the dirt, begins to dig faster. You could also decide to attempt getting away with knowledge-only because you do not care or cannot inspire yourself. The best technique for remaining uninspired by the material is the same way to lose a friend; distance yourself from it for prolonged periods. Once the test arrives, there will be nothing for either of you to relate over; it will have questions for your wisdom to which you have no answer.

University, like life, is part roll-of-the-dice (your life up to that point, up-bringing, trauma, abilities, skills, quality of professors and TAs instructing the course, etc.), and part effort in devotion to the material (aka, your willingness/discipline to become a friend of the material). The worse the dice roll, the more the effort in devotion. Devotion to material is in your lifestyle and not just the material; if you eat poorly, sleep poorly, constantly book unnecessary distractions in your life, devotion will be of poor quality and will be reflected when the four months I call “your chance” fades and the exam takes you out. In the end, the sum of the two, luck and devotion, should yield the complete wisdom of the subject matter. By complete wisdom I mean enough play with the material to excel to your standard. It is difficult, it is frustrating, but now that you recognize the game, be a good sportsman and play what you’ve signed up for.