The best way to learn

Looking at my study log, it appears I've only put in around 8 hours a week for the past few weeks. That's certainly not going to get the job done; time to step it up a bit.

Meanwhile, an explanation of the posts of late is in order. I did fine in undergrad (well, the first year was a bit of a mess, but working on a farm the following summer provided sufficient motivation to fix that). While the graduate coursework at Cornell was significantly more challenging (no surprise there), I still did a fair job of getting through it. In short, by the time I had my masters, I felt I had done a pretty good job of learning stuff.

And, I suppose I had, but there is a whole 'nuther level beyond getting A's.

Once I started teaching, I realized that I could answer any question covered by the courses I had taught. Any. As in, I would get 100% on any reasonable test of the material. "The best way to learn something is to teach it" may be a cliche, but it's also true.

The reason, I believe, is twofold. First and foremost, there is a huge incentive to show up to class knowing the material: you look like an idiot if you don't. The students are supposed to struggle; the prof is not. Secondly, when the questions do come, they force you to rethink your presentation. Simply repeating what you just said won't help someone who didn't get it the first time. You need to find a different way to communicate the idea. This not only reinforces the idea; but also opens your mind to connections between ideas that might not have been apparent under the original presentation. The more connected the knowledge, the easier it is to retain it.

The confluence of these is that, when preparing for a lecture, good professors will anticipate the areas where students stumble and think about alternate ways to present it. My strategy was generally to make my first explanation different than what was in the text. That way, if students had already read the text (no, I'm not naive enough to think that most students read the text before the lecture), they would already be on the second explanation. If not, and a question came up, I could always fall back on what was in the text. This meant that I had dual explanations for pretty much everything the course covered. That's a powerful set of knowledge.

So that's what I'm trying to do with these named results. I come across the result in the text, and I try to figure out how I would present it differently to a class being taught out of this text. Sure, it would be even better to actually teach the class, but I think this method is pretty effective. Of course, there's no substitute for practice, so I really do need to up the hours and work more problems as well.