Learn to learn

One day a teacher was heard shouting at her pupil. “What happened to what I taught you yesterday?” she screamed. The distraught, yet naughty boy replied “Gone with the wind”.

Many of such witty replies from younger humans make us ponder. While all of us think that we are teaching people a lesson or two, we have to think again.

Nobody teaches anybody anything.

This may sound untrue if we are to go by the mere words.  But think again. The first lesson that we need as living beings, in particular, mammals is about getting out of the womb.

Almost all of us living today knew it with our eyes closed!

So who taught us how to get out into the world? We learnt. And this to me seems as the ultimate truth. We all learn. We may not know a lot of things, but when the situation presents itself we learn or we perish.

Therefore as humans who have the capacity to analyse and then act, we must strive at making our children aware of the different ways by which we learn. There is a lot of stress on teaching methodologies and teaching aids.

Surprisingly very little emphasis is laid on learning methodologies or learning aids.

All of us do not learn at the same rate. This may not always be because some of us smarter than the others. It could also mean some of us have a need to assimilate, internalise and analyse what we have learnt before we are ready with the next cycle of learning.

Some learn by observation faster than others, while some of us learn through pattern recognition.

Memorisation is a very useful technique which keeps us in good stead even during old age. While there is a school of thought that shuns the very word, I feel both as a learning tool and as a mental stimulator this is a very useful learning technique.

We must take extra efforts in identifying the learning pattern in kids and then develop tools that will enable them to learn at their pace and method. Once we have achieved in creating this awareness in children, learning rather than teaching becomes easy.

This is very important because learning happens as long as we live. My father often said we all begin with learning to learn, and then we learn. Some of us learn to teach and then we teach to learn.