Learning to learn

Teachers come in lots of different flavors, although most of them will not let you lick them to figure out what flavor they are.  This is a good thing because we learners also come in lots of flavors.  (You can pause here to lick your arm to detect your own flavor if you like.)  Some teachers are peanut butter to our chocolate, lox to our cream cheese, rosemary to our roast potatoes.  What we need to know comes flowing out of those teachers in ways that we can easily absorb.  The challenges become manageable with their help.

Then there are the kind of teachers who are cheddar to our peppermint, pickles to our fruit salad, or ice cream on our steak.  We can still learn from that second kind.  And, no, I don’t mean how to avoid them, although that is definitely a useful skill.  We can learn, by managing our attitudes, how to translate a totally foreign language into something we can understand.

While I was away on vacation, my son T.R. and I took a ski lesson together because we both want to improve.  Our instructor was blunt.  T. does better with a more encouraging style of teaching.  He heard that he was less competent than he thought he was and took that to mean that he was less competent than he really is.  It took a couple of days for him to process what the instructor said into something he could use, and even then he did better at applying what the instructor told me to do.  He made the best of a less than ideal situation.  And next time I would choose a different instructor for him.

For me, the bluntness worked.  Sure, my ego hurt a bit, but I came to the lesson knowing that I needed to learn and that I was not able to figure that out by myself.  Bluntness saves time.

My point, and yes, there is one in there somewhere, is that we, as learners have the responsibility to find the lessons.  When I am wearing my instructor/trainer/teacher hat, I try to make those lessons fun and accessible.  I do that by remembering that I am a learner, too.