6 Preliminaries
Even in a course like this you maystillbe floundering because you may not understandwhyit
is important for you to participate with your whole spirit in the quest to learn anything you ever
choose to study. In a word, you simply may not give a rodent’s furrybehind about learning the
material so that studying is always a fight with yourself to “make” yourself do it – so that no matter
what happens,you lose. This too may sound very familiar to some.
The importance of engagement and participation in “active learning”(as opposed to passively
being taught) is not really a new idea. Medical schools were four yearprograms in the year 1900.
They are four year programs today, where the amount of information that a physician must now
master in those four years is probablyten times greatertoday than it was back then. Medical
students are necessarily among the most efficient learners on earth, or they simply cannot survive.
In medical schools, the optimal learning strategy is compressed toa three-step adage: See one,
do one, teach one.
See a procedure (done by a trained expert).
Do the procedure yourself, with the direct supervision and guidance of a trained expert.
Teach a student to do the procedure.
See, do, teach. Now youarea trained expert (of sorts), or at least so we devoutly hope, because
that’s all the training you are likely to get until you start doing the procedure over and over again
with real humans and with limited oversight from an attending physician with too many other things
to do. So you practice and study on your own until you achieve realmastery, because a mistake can
killsomebody.
This recipe is quite general, and can be used to increaseyour ownlearning in almostanyclass.
In fact, lifelong success in learning with or without the guidance of a good teacher is a matter of
discovering the importance ofactive engagement and participationthat this recipe (non-uniquely)
encodes. Let us rank learning methodologies in terms of “probable degree of active engagement of
the student”. By probable I mean the degree of active engagement that I as an instructor have
observed in students over many years and which is significantly reinforced by research in teaching
methodology, especially in physics and mathematics.
Listening to a lecture as a transcription machine with your brain in “copy machine” mode is
almost entirely passive and is formoststudentsprobablya nearly complete waste of time. That’s
not to say that “lecture” in the form of an organized presentationand review of the material to be
learned isn’t important or is completely useless! It serves onevery important purposein the grand
scheme of learning, but by being passiveduringlectureyoucause it to fail in its purpose. Its purpose
isnotto give you a complete, line by line transcription of the words of your instructor to ponder
later and alone. It is to convey, for a brief shining moment, thesenseof theconceptsso that you
understand them.
It is difficult to sufficiently emphasize this point. If lecture doesn’t make senseto youwhen the
instructor presents it, you will have to work much harder to achieve the sense of the material “later”,
if later ever comes at all. If you fail to identify the important concepts during the presentation
and see the lecture as a string of disconnected facts, you will haveto remembereachfact as if it
were an abstract string of symbols, placing impossible demands on your memory even if you are
extraordinarily bright. If you fail to achieve some degree of understanding (orsynthesisof the
material, if you prefer) in lecture by asking questions and getting expert explanations on the spot,
you will have to build it later out of your notes on a set of abstract symbols that made no sense to
you at the time. You might as well be trying to translate Egyptian Hieroglyphs without a Rosetta
Stone, and the best of luck to you withthat.
Reading is a bit more active – at the very least your brain is more likely tobe somewhat engaged if
you aren’t “just” transcribing the book onto a piece of paper or letting the words and symbols happen
in your mind – but is still pretty passive. Even watching nifty movies orcool-ee-oh demonstrations