Teaching Yourself

Back when I was in school, the expectation was simple: you were handed a skill and told to master it by yourself. No teacher walked us through a special method for math or reading. Tutoring and the kind of extra support that feels routine now existed only for the rare student who genuinely couldn't get a subject on their own. Pull one kid aside for extra help during class and everyone else lost ground. We were supposed to have sharp memorization and clean handwriting, and there were contests for both, with real winners and real losers. For a kid who had the knack, that setup was fuel. Looking back with what we understand about the brain today, it packed heads full of knowledge and built strong problem-solving wiring.

Those kinds of learners haven't vanished. My son works out math problems on his own, and so do I. When my kids were in school I was no help at all with the "new" math they brought home. That caught me off guard, because I'd taken advanced math in high school and done fine. Calculus just wasn't on offer back then. I never really conquered it either, though in graduate school I memorized the derivations when calculus turned up inside a statistics course.

Teach math through a fixed method and it won't "click" for everyone. Computers are the same story. A lot of the time you have to poke at it until it makes sense to you, because when another person teaches you, they teach you their path, and their path may not fit your head at all. People are wired differently; what unlocks it for one person leaves the next one stuck. There are a dozen ways to get something done on a machine, and the way a task works in one program is often nothing like the way it works in another. Programs also tend to assume you already know certain things and quietly skip the step. Someone who's comfortable with how computers usually behave can fill that gap almost without thinking. A beginner has nothing to fill it with.

Assuming the other person knows something, or knows how to do it, is a quick way for somebody to come off looking foolish. Whether that somebody is you or them depends entirely on who gets to declare the winner of the argument. I run into this constantly with men who decide that if you can't talk them into agreeing, you must be wrong by default. The trouble sits right there, in who claims the right to call the result. So I just don't take part in arguments built that way.

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