Learning, Doing, Thinking
My daughter, Mihika, recently turned 12, and I’m ecstatic to report that the apple has fallen very far from the tree. I’m as good at dancing, you see, as the Pune Municipal Corporation is at building and maintaining Pune’s infrastructure. Which is to say that I have no clue about dancing. None whatsoever.
But my daughter, on the other hand, is as good at dancing as Pune’s local politicians are at inaugurating things. Which is to say that she practices dancing day in and day out, and often for no good reason except that she was born to do it.
And her dream - the thing that she knows that she wants to do for the rest of her life - is to run a cafe that doubles up as a dance studio. Depending on her mood, it could be pure Bharatnatyam, or it could be fusion. Depending on when you ask her, the cafe will definitely have a full service kitchen. On other days, she’ll decide that it’ll serve only sandwiches and coffee. (As an aside, I’ve quit worrying about my own employment once AI takes over everything. I make the World’s Best Cheese Grilled Sandwiches, she says, and I have the Chief Sandwich Maker role waiting for me, anytime I say the word. So there.)
Do To Show That You Have Learnt
We live in a world in which we do projects to show that we have learnt. What if we could flip that around? I’ll show you what such a world might look like, but for now, let’s take a look at the world as it exists today.
Here’s an image generated by Gemini on my request (the prompt is given below the image):
If you know enough about hiring in the software world, have fun spotting all the near and not-so-near misses in Gemini’s creation. But the reason I asked Gemini to create this image is because I wanted to talk today about the projects section on all of our CV’s when we first entered the workforce.
For most of us (myself included), the projects section didn’t speak to our passion or our dreams. The projects section of our CV was optimizing for a very specific thing. That thing being proof that we knew how to do stuff that we would have to do once we found employment in your organization.
Ananya didn’t grow up dreaming of using MERN stacks. She didn’t while away afternoons in her classes daydreaming of running sentiment analysis for social media. She dreamt of her own equivalent of a dance studio + cafe. Each and everyone one of us have dreamt our own dreams about what we might do when we grow up.
Me, for example, I dreamt of being a writer. I wasn’t clear about what exactly that entailed, and I was assured by everybody that there was no future in it, but my afternoons in classrooms were whiled away by dreaming of the day I would become a writer.
But as you begin to grow up, reality begins to set in. Most of us realize that our dreams are not likely to “work”. And so we learn to give up on our dreams and we learn how to do sentiment analysis for social media. If we do this well enough, we get to join an office, where we get to forward emails.
Learn So That You Can Do
What if Ananya, Mihika, you and I could learn to do all the things that we need to, in order to do the things we really wanted to?
What if Mihika could tell whoever she was learning from that she wanted to start her own dance studio+cafe? What if that could be broken down into the skillsets she needed to learn to make that larger goal possible?
That is, what if she was told that she’d need to get good at marketing, inventory management, vendor management, real estate contracts, yoga and a course in being a barista for her to have a more than even chance of succeeding at her dream? That list isn’t meant to be comprehensive or correct, to be clear - but you get where I’m going with this.
Similarly, what if I was told that I need to take courses in creative writing, non-fiction writing, researching, marketing, podcasting, note-taking and editing if I really wanted to become a successful writer?
Further, what if whoever we told our dream to didn’t just break up our larger goal into smaller skill sets for us to learn, but also ended up designing courses for each of these skill sets? What if these courses were converted into a schedule that fit into our preferences in terms of length, depth, thoroughness and desired level of expertise? What if these courses came with mini-project? Each mini-project helped us evaluate how well we’d learned the topic in question, of course. But each mini-project also gave us a deeper appreciation of how this specific piece of the jigsaw puzzle fit into our larger objective?
One-to-Many vs One-to-One
Why haven’t we tried to do this before? Because it is not humanly possible for a professor, not matter how good they are, to customize their lecture delivery to suit each student’s individual preferences. When I teach statistics this year, I cannot customize my examples, my problem sets and my case studies to suit that one student who wants to start a dance studio+cafe.
It is up to each student to understand the larger point, and then apply it to their own specific case, assuming they can do so (and wish to do so). This, to put it mildly, doesn’t always happen.
But when you flip the classroom over to a one-to-one model, where the student has lessons customized to suit the specific reason they’re studying this subject, then this is not just possible, but truly desirable. If you can teach on a one-on-one basis, you absolutely can and should customize what you teach, how you teach, and why you teach whatever it is that you’re teaching.
We learn the same things, but with different reasons and underlying motivations. And it is up to us to translate that common learning into our own specific applications. But if what we learn is tied, intimately and clearly, to the why we learn, won’t learning be more purposeful for each and every one of us?
We used to do in order to show that we have learnt.
What if we can learn in order to be able to do what we’ve always wanted to?
Enabling such a world is one of the things we want to be able to do with LFE. In tomorrow’s post, I’ll cover how we plan to go about it.