Understanding From The Ground Up
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What an interesting week. I discussed the same concept with some colleagues, average age 35, and my primary school aged daughters.
What an interesting week. I discussed the same concept with some colleagues, average age 35, and my primary school aged daughters.
It started one night at the dinner table. My girls were telling us how they’d been learning about perimeter and area in maths.
Soon the pencils and papers were out! Zoe and Emma proudly drew some shapes and formulas and showed us what they could do.
Then my wife grabbed the pencil and casually showed them how to deconstruct the perimeter of an irregular shape into its basic form (the sum of the lengths of each side).
Young minds were blown! We then explained how valuable it is to understand anything in life from the ground up and contrasted it against memorization of facts and formulas.
At our lunch & learn yesterday I was noticing my colleagues often simply nodding their heads when told to do something a certain way.
So I jumped on my soap box once again and spent some time introducing them to the power of thinking from first principle.
Soon they were asking “WHY shouldn’t I do that?” and “what does it MEAN when I set that to 2?”
“I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding; they learn by some other way—by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!” — Richard Feynman
fs.blog: https://lnkd.in/dyqTpYV
It started one night at the dinner table. My girls were telling us how they’d been learning about perimeter and area in maths.
Soon the pencils and papers were out! Zoe and Emma proudly drew some shapes and formulas and showed us what they could do.
Then my wife grabbed the pencil and casually showed them how to deconstruct the perimeter of an irregular shape into its basic form (the sum of the lengths of each side).
Young minds were blown! We then explained how valuable it is to understand anything in life from the ground up and contrasted it against memorization of facts and formulas.
At our lunch & learn yesterday I was noticing my colleagues often simply nodding their heads when told to do something a certain way.
So I jumped on my soap box once again and spent some time introducing them to the power of thinking from first principle.
Soon they were asking “WHY shouldn’t I do that?” and “what does it MEAN when I set that to 2?”
“I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding; they learn by some other way—by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!” — Richard Feynman
fs.blog: https://lnkd.in/dyqTpYV