Learning in childhood

Do you remember when you were at school, and tried to memorize everyday sometimes totally useless things like name of kings in the history, microeconomics or physical formulas. After a hard day of learning, you felt that you learned nothing, you cannot even remember on simple things, you learned during that day. However after a night of sleeping, when you had the exam, suddenly you were able to recall all the knowledge, and you understand the connections, you connected the dots. It works like magic.

“Chewing the problem”

This lesson suggests that sometimes you had to learn very hard, repeat the same things over and over, It works like the same in every field of the life, when you sport, when you learn and even in your work. I like to call this “chewing the problem”. If you pass easily on an exam, I perfectly sure, you have not learned anything, and it is not because you did not learned it is because you learned only one aspect of the problem. If you practice you would discover different aspects of the problem. You experiences become deeper and deeper.

Just an example, when you want to make bake a bread, you first put the ingredients together, but you have to knead it to make a dough. The more thoroughly you knead the dough, the better the quality will be.

Another example, when you learn a dance, nothing is more important than the number of repetitions. Everybody could learn even the most complex steps and dances, but to never forget a dance, there should be a lot of practice, deep (permanent) knowledge will emerge after five to six month of practice (if you have a dance class every week).

I am sure you know the proverb “Practice makes perfect”, in other languages it sound more or less like “Practice is the mother or wisdom”, which refers that you could only arrange wisdom, if you practiced a lot. One important thing is, that there are a lot of learning methods that effectiveness is different.

Deepness of learning methods

From my own experiences, the deepness and effectiveness of the learning is the following:

Deepness of Learning,Learning method,Type of method
10%,Reading,Passive
20%,Hearing,Passive
30%,Seeing,Passive
60%,Try it out or Talking about it,Active
80%,Doing in real life,Active
90%,Teaching in real life,Active

At some of the universities it is a best practice that students help each other in learning by one of them first tries to learn fast the book, than he will teach directly his or her friend, who never heard the book before. The teaching is not perfect, but the “teacher” connects the dots during the speech, and at the end, he will be almost an expert at that topic.

Summary

(1) Transforming information to wisdom is always a process, it takes time and effort
(2) Spending more time on “chewing” a problem, will result higher quality solution
(3) Teaching somebody will result, the best insight in a topic

Joel Stafford

My profession is online marketing and development (10+ years experience), check my latest mobile app called Upcoming or my Chrome extensions for ChatGPT. But my real passion is reading books both fiction and non-fiction. I have several favorite authors like James Redfield or Daniel Keyes. If I read a book I always want to find the best part of it, every book has its unique value.