You read the same paragraph three times. You jump between videos. You practise again. You take a break and have another go the next day, but your progress seems slow. You keep forgetting what you just understood, and it feels like nothing is really sticking or connecting. Day after day, you feel more frustrated. Maybe it’s learning to code, maybe it’s learning to cook, or ride a bike. Whatever it is, we get left feeling disappointed and demoralised.
We have all been there, feeling defeated because we felt we were failing to learn something, but… could it be that perhaps you weren’t failing at all? Perhaps you were simply trying to build a picture before enough pieces had found where they belonged?
Let’s put all this in perspective. Think about the last time you felt defeated while using a smartphone. For most of us, it would be a resounding “never”. Now, imagine someone who has lived most of their life before the digital age, maybe like our own grandfather or grandmother. They would be feeling lost when using a smartphone. Many of us would know someone like this.
How Would You Teach Grandmother To Use A Smartphone?
Take a second and imagine how you would begin to teach Grandma to use a smartphone when she has only ever seen other people using smartphones.
You might start her off from somewhere familiar, such as by showing her how calling a friend with a smartphone is like calling with one of those older phones with buttons. Once Grandma gets it, you might then start to introduce other simple apps such as calendar, notes, and messaging. You might compare them to physical things that already exist: the calendar app to paper calendars, notes app to a notebook, and messaging to a mailbox.
As Grandma gets familiar, you might start to introduce her to new ways of using those apps. Calendars can be marked with scheduled events, messaging can be used to leave a grocery list. She may also start being creative with the apps, such as using messaging to send jokes to you. After some time and practice, she might start talking to everyone whose contact she can get without breaking a sweat.
How Would You Not Teach Grandmother To Use A Smartphone?
Now, take another moment to think about how you would not teach Grandma.
You probably wouldn’t be teaching Grandma ‘advanced’ features like backup and restore from the very beginning. You would also know in the back of your mind to hold off on that until she had at least grasped the simple and familiar stuff.
You wouldn’t try to teach her the whole smartphone at once nor expect her to get it in a day, and importantly, you wouldn’t expect her to remember a giant pile of instructions first and somehow become proficient later. You would take it slow, teaching her one thing a day, heck, even one thing a week.
Finally, you wouldn’t rush her practice. Instead, you would let her take time to get familiar, and you might even want to help her get some of that regular practice, such as by using calls and messaging as part of your routine with her.
Why Do We Start With What We Already Know?
There is certainly more than one way to learn new things, but learning becomes much easier when we start with what is familiar. In particular, we start where context is familiar. We think of a familiar setting, and somewhere in that setting is a thing or space that this new thing can be compared to. This starts our new thing off in a familiar setting, a familiar context. It starts to find its footing. Over time, it begins to connect to other things that are already familiar to you.
The strongest contexts often come from needs or wants, and usually, we fit new things into the situations we are most acquainted with.
I know all that sounds really confusing. So let’s bring Grandma back for a bit.
Let’s say Grandma needs to contact you, family, and friends while she has to be somewhere outside of home. She figures that she can bring the smartphone with her when she goes out.
→ known need: I need to contact people
→ known behaviour: I use a telephone
→ new possibility: this telephone comes with me
When Grandma has a list of groceries she wants you to get on your way back from work, she figures that messaging would work better than calling.
→ known need: I need to give you a grocery list
→ existing understanding: I can use a written note to give you a list
→ new use: I can send the grocery list as a text message
We see two questions in action here:
- What does this new thing remind me of? What familiar context can I fit new learning into? This helps us connect the unfamiliar to something we already understand.
- What can I do with it? How can I use this thing that I have just learnt about for some purpose? This helps us find somewhere useful to put that new understanding to work.
Once we use these questions to help find context, we start to be able to use what we have learnt. Using our new learning repeatedly then gives what we have learnt more opportunities to stick and connect, rather than leaving us with a list of isolated steps to remember.
When Nothing Seems To Connect
So now. You read the same paragraph three times. You jump between videos. You practise again. You come back tomorrow. Nothing seems to connect. Remember those?
Now compare yourself with Grandma. On the surface, the two of you might seem quite different. She felt lost with a smartphone, something that you know and use like the back of your hand. But underneath that difference is an experience that might feel surprisingly familiar: when faced with something that feels hard to learn, both you and Grandma can end up feeling just as lost. So maybe you aren’t all that different after all. Grandma didn’t yet have enough familiar context for the new information. Maybe sometimes we don’t either.
Difficulty can sometimes be the experience of receiving information before it has enough context to become understanding. Maybe the pieces haven’t connected yet, and we are still unsure about how exactly to think about and pick up the new learning. What we can do is try to find something familiar to compare it to and try fitting it into a picture. This certainly gives us a new perspective on learning, and perhaps this gives us a different way to think about learning something like crypto.
