Learn better by...teaching?
I should’ve listened to grandma.
One warm crackling fireplace-soaked Christmas years ago, she asked me what I was going to pursue at university.
“Accounting!” I excitedly told her, feeling that way for the last time ever.
“Eww. Don’t do that. It’s too boring for you.”
Well, nearly 20 years later, all I can think is that first line up above. She was totally right. Boring is subjective and I didn’t know any better at the time. But damn, boring can be a hard topic to study in school!
Some semesters I nailed it, some I struggled, but I picked up one handy trick along the way to help get me over those humps of boringness.
I didn’t know it at the time, but the strategy was based on something called the protégé effect. Essentially, it’s the mostly-proven concept of learning via teaching others.
Apes Together Strong
Imagine your friend asking you to teach them a section on the upcoming exam.
The chances you’re gonna collect your thoughts, the main concepts, and organize them better than you would otherwise are pretty damn high. And that process is what is behind the protégé effect way of thinking.
I talk a lot more about how it works in the link above, but mainly I’ve been thinking about this as a new-age kind of method—how people are digitizing it, as it were.
I heard of this college class where every student opened up a Google shared document in a massive collaboration effort. Students would write notes in each class in real-time, and other students could comment with questions, then the answers would get incorporated into the notes.
By the end of the semester, they essentially had their own crowd-sourced textbook!
With the professor’s guidance, the class taught each other the subject inside and out. (Note: I’m sure lazy Greg in the back corner of the room didn’t bother participating though. Dammit Greg, get your shit together.)
Going Greatly
That story (hopefully it was true) kind of inspired me. Afterward, I talked to a couple other online writer friends here in Taiwan and came up with a simple idea.
What if, instead of pursuing specific money-making projects, we just learn and write about what we actually want to learn in life?
It went something like this:
Brainstorm the ideas and concepts you want to learn about (for me it’s writing/psychology/history/weird shit/peanut butter tuna sandwiches)
Find lists of all the different subjects within those broader concepts and slap them down on a giant to-write list
Try learning one idea a day and writing it in the form of teaching the concept, with no conjecture or stretching of the original idea
Post on the website we chose for this (still working out the kinks) and repost on Medium with a canonical link
Profit?
Maybe, maybe not.
But there are more forms of profit than just money, and I’m sure my mind and intellectual curiosity will be far richer by the time this extended rabbit hole is finished.
So, how did they react?
One of them ran screaming for the hills.
And the other is somewhat interested, but perhaps not convinced of its potential just yet. Either way, I now have at least half of my work planned for the next 6 months based on the concept above.
Maybe this experiment won’t fill my coffers, but I’m pretty excited to pursue it. I also have the added bonus of sharing the more interesting learnings here, cleverly curated for your curiosity. (Alliteration was another recent one.)
Until next time folks!
This message has been brought to you by a non-lizard-king named J.J. Pryor.
P.S. Substack apparently has polls now. Neat.
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Header image credit: Explorer from The World: Round It and Over It (1881) published by Chester Glass.
That's the most reliable learning approach, followed by closely doing mistakes.
A d you're forced to know more than the students. You get to be excellent in teaching if you like the subject matter. And accept that you can't know everything, bit learn where to find it.
My empirical personal perspective
That follows the "learn to do by doing" principle. Or is it those who can do, those who can't teach. Maybe it's both. Either way, I wish you success in your endeavour. Learning new things is so important to keep young.