Opinions are like noses, everyone has one, and they often stick them where they are unwanted.

I’m not a trained educator, and I currently have no desire to be one. As such, my opinion on what a learning theory is comes from a lifetime of being educated. Like many people, my formidable years were filled with boring classes that I had very little interest in. Unfortunately, when I wasn’t interested in a class, I didn’t apply myself. Due to this, I was thought to be slower than most children. However, when I was in a class I was interested in, I excelled. Usually, this was in a class that was more hands-on; such as when we dissected frogs in biology. I quickly found what I excelled in, and focused my efforts on those classes. The classes that didn’t catch my attention, I let fall by the wayside.

I was young then. Nowadays, I’m far more disciplined. I have also realized that even if a class isn’t catching my attention, I’m in it for a reason. You could say that I see the bigger picture. Knowing that I’ll admit that I really dislike studying. However, I really ingrain things into my brain by repeating them over and over.

I do believe that it is the educator’s job to catch the attention of the students. However, I believe it’s also the student’s job to find something interesting in every class they are in. Students must see the light at the end of the tunnel and be focused on the long-term goal.

Interest

Currently, the non-family things that interest me the most are:

Luckily, my current job affords me the opportunity to work on all of those. I won’t be delving into each topic; that’s beyond the scope of this article. Instead, I’ve linked you to Wikipedia to learn more about each one, if you so desire. I will, however, tell you how I have taught myself everything that I know about each of those topics.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been interested in computing and technology. I think that rings true for a lot of my generation, and truer for more of oncoming generations. Although I’ve written several blog articles, I’ve never really been interested in being published or writing about what I was working on. I think this came from years of talking with my friends and family and watching their eyes roll back into their skull; except my wife. She is either very interested in all the technology things I tell her, or she is really good at faking interest while just enjoying the excitement on my face as I talk to her. The point is: I’ve been motivated by an obscenely more amount of interest in technology that the people around me.

As such, when I see a mundane task, I cringe. I’ve done this tasks tens if not hundreds of times. Why haven’t I written a script yet that could just do this for me? That’s where it all started. I first wrote a script that would create new e-mail accounts based on the requests in a form. If something was abnormal about the request, it deferred the resolution of that request to a human. This sole nine out of ten requests with a few minutes of us getting the request. Our faculty and staff were happy, and I was ecstatic that I could focus on other things.

I started programming scripts that would ensure a computer was in the state that we expected it to be. This is known as configuration management. The fact that I took it to the extreme and started configuring all of our systems like this is known as infrastructure as code. Since I’m constantly looking for new ways to implement these advancements, I’ve realized that I’m interested in the research and development of emerging technology. I’ve written hundreds of thousands if not millions of lines of code in my pursuit of these interests. This code is used by all of UNT, not just CAS supported systems.

Before I get too far off topic, I’ll stop myself there. When I’m interested in something:

I can talk about it for days.
I will research ways to improve it.
Implement it in my daily life.
Let it consume me.

I believe that the same can be said about anyone. If a student is interested in a topic, they will open their mind and learn it. If they are not interested in a topic, learning will be as constructive as a couple conversing when they are both angry. As I’ve already touched on, interest doesn’t have to direct. It can be indirect, as long as the student can keep the end in mind.

Doing

At some point in high school, I learned that there are three types of learning styles:

Visual
Auditory
Kinesthetic

These are pretty basic, so I won’t discuss them all in this article. I do, however, want to discuss one of them: kinesthetic.

I believe that everyone can learn from and needs all of these models in their every class. However, I also believe that one of them stands out above the rest: kinesthetic. I’ve never meant anyone who has said that they don’t learn better from doing.

Some would believe that there must be a set of instructions where a student must be told how to do something before they can do it. I agree that this is needed to understand the basics. However, the advanced training that I attended tends to put you in a scenario and tell you to figure it out. Just like necessity is the mother of invention, she’s also the mother of learning. Just about everything I have implemented for my job has been learned through necessity.

I honestly believe this is why Nike’s slogan rings so true to so many people. Just do it!

Reinforcement

Even when I really needed to accomplish something, I didn’t memorize how to do it on the first try. I had to look it up over and over again so that I could do it over and over again. This was, of course, before I automated it.

At some point in high school, I also learned that our brains are extremely good at categorizing. So good in fact, that we do it to our own detriment. When we realize how our brain works, we can start to manipulate it into categorizing things to our benefit. Sometimes, that’s encoded to our brains with a jingle or a rhythm. Other times, it’s by drawing it out and applying colors or shapes to the data.

Everyone is different in this respect, but we’re also all the same. Unless you’ve got an exceptional mind, you need to reinforce what you’re learning or it will be dismissed and you won’t be able to recall what you have learned.

Summary

Regardless of who you are, you need to learn how you learn. There isn’t an educator in the world who can tell you how to study or how to memorize. There are educators that can help guide you to it, but only you can discover how you learn. Once you learn that, manipulate the heck out of it to your advantage. You will be glad you did.

References

(2016, October 20). Anatomy Biology Brain [Digital image]. Retrieved June 10, 2018, from https://pixabay.com/en/anatomy-biology-brain-thought-mind-1751201/