Cram. Memorize. Regurgitate. Forget.

By Peter Kaufman
If you are or have ever been a student, then the title of this post probably needs no explanation. You should know exactly the process I am referring to. You probably also know why I am writing this post at this particular time of year. After all, this is the season to cram, memorize, regurgitate and forget.
As another school year comes to a close, students all across the country and at all educational levels are spending many of their waking hours engaged in a similar ritual: Shoving large amounts of material into their brains with the hope that they will retain it all just long enough so that they can spit everything back on a final exam. Once this act of expulsion is complete, the information is banished from their heads and they will probably never think of it again.

In educational circles this process is referred to by many names: drill and kill, rote learning, or the banking approach. It is the dominant paradigm or model of education in the United States and it has been for a long time.
When I was a high school student in New York in the 1980s, we had to take yearly standardized tests in most subjects called Regents Exams (students in New York still take these). In eleventh grade I took the math Regents on trigonometry. Much to my surprise and delight, I got a 100 on this exam. A perfect score. I was obviously very good at cramming, memorizing and regurgitating.
Apparently, I was also very good at forgetting. I recently decide to re-take a version of the current Regents trigonometry exam. Of the thirty-nine question I was able to understand only four of them. Of the four questions that I could answer only three of them were correct. My final score was a 6. In 28 years I went from a perfect score of 100 to a nearly imperfect score of zero.
Just because I have forgotten how to calculate and use trigonometric functions such as sine, cosine, and tangent does not mean that I did not learn anything back in my eleventh grade math class. I know that by learning this form of advanced mathematics I was exercising important compartments of my brain that may not have been otherwise trained. I’m sure this gave me some of the building blocks of analytical thinking.
But I still wonder: If we are learning so many subjects in school just to forget them soon after we take a test on them then what is the function of this educational method? Why rely so heavily on a system of testing when we know that most of these tests are measuring students’ abilities to hastily cram and memorize facts and figures for the short term instead of authentically engage with and retain information for the long term?
As sociologists we often speak about manifest and latent functions. These ideas were developed by Robert K. Merton—one of the most influential sociologists of the 20^th century. Manifest functions are those things that occur that are observed or expected. Latent functions are those things that are unobserved or unanticipated.
The manifest function of testing in schools—especially with our increasingly and nearly fanatical obsession with standardized tests—is to measure the extent to which students are learning and to gauge how effectively teachers are teaching. Educational administrators and policy makers who promote more testing believe that the tests provide the best measure to determine the performance of students and their teachers.
The latent functions of testing in schools are not so clear. They may include such things as teachers feeling as if they must “teach to the test” and students feeling alienated and disengaged from learning. These results were not expected nor are they easily observed. In fact, there are few attempts to even measure them.
Sometimes latent functions such as these are also referred to as unintended consequences. No administrator or policy maker would want teachers and students to feel detached and frustrated with the process of teaching and learning but increasingly that seems to be the result of this over-emphasis on testing.
What troubles me most about an educational system based on cramming, memorizing, regurgitating, and forgetting is that these latent functions and unintended consequences result in something else about which Merton wrote: Dysfunctions. Dysfunctions are the negative effects of a process that disrupt social life.
As a college professor, I see the dysfunctional effects of an educational system based on testing when I look out into a room full of students. After years cramming, memorizing, regurgitating, and forgetting, many students enter college with little intellectual curiosity much less a sense of academic excitement. Too often, the students just want to be told what they need to learn to pass the test or what they need to write to get a good grade on a paper. Because so much of their schooling has been based on this dysfunctional model, they have forgotten how to be the self-directed and genuine learners that they were when they first entered school.
In all my years as a college professor, I have never given quizzes, tests, or final exams. Instead, I ask students to write papers, make oral presentations, participate actively in class discussions, and work on collaborative projects. The manifest functions of my method are to strengthen students’ oral and written communication skills—the two most important skills they need for their future career pursuits (I don’t know of any job that requires you to fill in little bubbles).
The latent functions of my pedagogical methods are not as easily observed nor are they as readily expected—at least not by students who are unaccustomed to this type of teaching. By refusing to use quizzes, tests, and final exams, I hope to transform this dysfunctional educational model into a functional pursuit of knowledge: Instead of cramming, students will engage authentically with the material. Instead of merely memorizing, students will connect what they are learning with their lived experiences. Instead of regurgitating information, students will use their new-found knowledge in their daily lives. And instead of forgetting everything they were “taught,” students will retain and build upon their comprehension of the subject matter.
I’m not naïve enough to think that my teaching methods are a panacea, a cure-all for the problems of education. But I do find that most students appreciate the opportunity to be treated as real learners and not as parrot-squawking automatons. What’s your opinion? Given your experiences in school what type of educational model do you prefer?

A 'B-school' in India Reaches out to Rural Women

Life has changed dramatically for Malan Mane in the past two years. The 50-year-old wicker basket weaver was once considered unintelligent and was often disregarded by her fellow villagers. Today, Mane manages her cash flow efficiently, has a grip on market dynamics and trades with panache. Her income has increased from US$30 a month in 2010 to US$100 at present.
Mane still makes baskets out of bamboo -- the woody grass that grows in the tropics -- but now saves on raw material cost by buying directly from the farmers instead of through a middleman. Encouraged by her success and her growing respect in the community, Mane's husband, who earlier used to stealthily sell her baskets to buy liquor, now helps her in the business. This has enabled Mane, who lives in Vaduj village in Satara district, 270 miles from Mumbai, to supply her goods to a larger customer base of vegetable vendors and store keepers. She can now also reach out to neighboring villages.
With the increase in sales, Mane is able to save US$10 every month. She has taken two microloans totaling US$150 from the local Mann Deshi Mahila Sahakari Bank, a co-operative bank run by women for women. Mane used the first loan to attach a tin roof to the family hut. She also bought a television. With the second loan, she wants to build a shed to stock her baskets and raw materials. "People who used to call me names, now respect me," she says.
Mane didn't become business savvy overnight. She's a product of the Mann Deshi Business School (MDBS), a unique business school for unlettered women. Set up in 2006, MDBS, which has its main center in Mhaswad in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, is a symbol of empowerment for rural women. Over the past six years, it has set up four branches in Maharashtra and one in the southern state of Karnataka and has transformed over 40,000 women into successful entrepreneurs.
Like Mane, the other women who have been educated at MDBS have little in common with the well-heeled students in MBA programs around the world. They are an eclectic mix of ages ranging from 19 to 50. They include a potter, a spice and noodle maker, a seamstress, a goat and sheep herder, a farmer, a homemaker and a bangle vendor. Most of the women come from families that earn less than a dollar a day. And in most cases, the women are the sole breadwinners trying to make ends meet.
"Most women came to us for loans to either start a new business or scale up their existing ones. That's when we decided to start the b-school," according to 53-year-old Chetna Gala Sinha, founder of the Mann Deshi Bank and MDBS. "We didn't want to provide [the women] just business capital. We wanted to also offer skills, knowledge and motivation to run their enterprises." Sinha, who is married to a farmer in Mhaswad, adds that MDBS is probably the world's first -- and so far only -- business management school of its kind.
All the MDBS branches are co-located with the Mann Deshi Bank, except in the district of Satara where the classes are conducted in any available space, be it a field, ground, temple or a student's house. In Mhaswad, MDBS has acquired an 18,000 square-foot plot and is currently constructing a three-story building, which will house the Mann Deshi Bank, four classrooms -- with a total seating capacity of 200 for MDBS, and also a small guest house. By 2015, Sinha aims to have nine branches of MDBS, four mobile B-schools and reach 100,000 women.
Ajit Rangnekar, dean of the Hyderabad-based Indian School of Business, points out that India's education needs are huge and extremely diverse, from global top leadership to dairy farmers, and one will have to try out many different models to meet those needs. "Some of these ideas will succeed, some may evolve, while others may fail," he says. "The real challenge in India is not about doing these experiments, but about codifying the learning from such initiatives, and scaling the successful ones rapidly so that the growth can be shared across the society."
It was in 1997 that Sinha, an economist, first set up the Mann Deshi Bank to provide microloans to day laborers working on farms so that they could purchase and sell fruits and vegetables. The objective was to draw the women out of a day-to-day existence and nudge them to consider other enterprises. The business school was a logical extension of the bank. "The capital provided by the bank goes hand-in-hand with the women's business goals," Sinha notes. "The bank is a patient investor and the b-school provides mentorship and grooms women to become entrepreneurs."
Vishal Kapoor, portfolio associate at Dasra, a Mumbai-based nonprofit organization, says the microloan and business school enterprises are a good fit. "Most microfinance institutions focus on providing loans without the backend education piece, which is important to ensure that the loans are used [effectively] for business purposes," he notes. Dasra came on board in 2009 to enhance MDBS's product delivery and help it scale up, build systems and processes, and manage growth.
MDBS is funded primarily by grants from various partners including HSBC Bank, Godfrey Phillips, the Gibraltar-based Bonita Trust, Accenture and the British Asian Trust. The grants have grown from Rs. 7 lakhs (around US$13,500 at the current exchange rate of US$1 = Rs. 51) in 2006 and are expected to touch Rs. 2 crore (US$ 387,000) this year. "For the past several years, Mann Deshi has proven that poor women are bankable," according to Naina Lal Kidwai, country head for HSBC India and director of HSBC Asia-Pacific. "The B-school has helped the women to be creative, resourceful and business savvy, enabling the mainstreaming of a significant number of women into India's economy."
HSBC became a sponsor of MDBS in 2006. At that time, the company had offered the Mann Deshi Bank a microfinance-loan at 9% interest as part of its mandatory priority sector lending obligation laid down by the Reserve Bank of India. When Sinha requested HSBC to step in as the founding sponsor of the business school, the firm obliged. After an initial seed funding in 2006, HSBC now gives an annual grant of around US$100,000 to MDBS.
A Five-Day MBA
At present, MDBS offers a menu of 25 courses, largely developed in-house. These include classes in financial and marketing management, and also vocational skills like computer training, dress designing and English language instruction. Typically, the women start by learning a skill at MDBS and then go on to take a management course before embarking on an entrepreneurial enterprise. A five-day homegrown MBA program introduced in 2010 and branded Deshi MBA educates entrepreneurs on branding, advertising, packaging and marketing their products. It also provides market access and visits to big and small business entities. "The women are exposed to concepts like sourcing and the benefits of purchasing raw material in advance so as not to go through price volatility," says Dasra's Kapoor. A Deshi MBA student is also provided with a mentor for a year.
Last year staff at Accion, an American nonprofit organization, developed teaching modules on cash management and self-management for the Deshi MBA program.Accion trained 19 MDBS coordinators in these new modules and also helped then to become more interactive in their teaching. "Earlier, they did not have a professional approach to training methodology. For instance, financial literacy was taught with savings as a means to an end," notes Usha Gopinath, director for client education at Accion.
The women who come to MDBS undergo a free counseling session to gauge their skillsets and interests to help them choose courses. For a nominal fee ranging from less than US three cents to US$6, a woman can enroll in MDBS at any time, irrespective of her age or educational background. The duration of the different courses vary from a day to around three months. Vanita Shinde, chief administrative officer at MDBS, says that since most of the women are farm laborers or housewives, classes are scheduled to suit them -- between 11a.m. and 3 p.m. The trainers are handpicked by Sinha and her team. They earn a nominal salary of US$60 a month, plus 50% of the fees paid by each of their students. The rest of the fee amount goes to MDBS. "This structure motivates trainers to bring more students to the school," says Rekha Kulkarni, CEO of the bank.
In order to expand MDBS' reach, in 2007, Sinha got Sycamore Networks' Gururaj 'Desh' Deshpande to sponsor a mobile school in his hometown of Hubli in Karnataka. The interiors of the bus are designed like classrooms to offer courses including computer training, fashion design and tailoring. Electricity is provided by an eight-hour battery back-up. The MDBS mobile school also offers financial products like savings accounts, loans, pensions and insurance backed by financial literacy training. "The women cannot afford to come to us, so we go to the people," Sinha notes. Another mobile school caters to women in the villages surrounding Mhaswad.
Attracting more students is important not just for MDBS, but for the country as a whole. In the drought-prone Mhaswad village alone, nearly three-quarters of the population live below the poverty line. Around 65% of the women are illiterate and lack access to education and job opportunities. This is a longstanding issue across India. According to UNICEF India, 90 million women in the country are illiterate and 20% of children between the ages of 6 and 14 are not in school. The government's inability to solve this problem has spurred social entrepreneurs like Sinha take on the responsibility to educate women at the bottom of the pyramid. Abha Thorat-Shah, director at the British Asian Trust, the London-based social fund that supports high impact charities in education, enterprise and health in South Asia, says her organization doesn't typically fund hybrid businesses, "but Mann Deshi is an exception. I love the fact that it's rural, training and skilling people in the state, and not promoting migration."
The gradual rise of the semi-literate housewife Vanita Pise, who has become the public face of Mann Deshi, is an interesting example of the impact that MDBS can have. In 2006, when avian flu destroyed her family's poultry business, Pise, who reared buffaloes and also ran a small tailoring class in her house, became the main earner. She wanted to boost her income and approached the Mann Deshi Bank. When Sinha suggested she take up the manufacturing of disposable paper cups, Pise defied her family and approached the bank for a loan to buy a machine to kick off the new business. Though she mastered the art of manufacturing cups, Pise had no clue about marketing. So she joined the business school. Armed with her new knowledge, she expanded into disposable plates, and saw an exponential growth in business. Pise now owns 12 machines to make cups and plates, and earns US$300 a month. She is also looking at further expanding into making cardboard folders and spice powder.
Pise's grit and entrepreneurial skills secured her a seat on the Mann Deshi Bank Board in 2011. "The eighth grade-educated Vanita now handles demand drafts and check clearances. She is definitely a role model for our women," Kulkarni notes.
Challenges Ahead
But the road ahead for MDBS is not without roadblocks. Pointing out that the school aims to serve 100,000 women by 2015, HSBC's Kidwai says: "The biggest challenge for the organization is to be able to extend its reach to remote geographical areas and reach out to a greater number of underserved women without compromising on the quality of services currently offered. As the organization expands its base and scales up its operations, it will also need to ensure that it has a viable model in place for the school to be financially sustainable in the long run." ISB's Rangnekar notes that there is an important role in India for micro and small firms. "Such initiatives [like MDBS] will hopefully further foster and boost the development of small entrepreneurs. [The organization's] challenge will be geographic growth, and evolving the program over time," he states.
Rangnekar makes another point. "The students of Mann Deshi b-school may initially require more support than their urban counterparts, and the institution is right in recognizing this and providing the support, but it must be careful not to directly or indirectly subsidize these ventures." According to Rangnekar, business schools have to recognize that students must take responsibility for their actions. "A school can guide and support students in their initiatives, but cannot take over the primary responsibility for their success," he adds.
There is also another issue. Some observers note that the entire organization is centered on the founder, Sinha. She does not agree though. She points out that efforts are already underway to gradually project Pise as the face of Mann Deshi. Other women are also being mentored to take over key operations. "People knew only Chetna [Sinha] earlier, now they know the Mann Deshi brand," Sinha says. "As a big organization evolves, you develop a brand.

Reinventing Education To Teach Creativity And Entrepreneurship

We don’t need to memorize things any more, but we still need teachers to guide our students toward learning the best ways to problem solve. The question is: How do you measure that?

As you read this, students all over the country are sitting for state standardized exams. Schools spend up to 40% of the year on test prep, so that, shall we say, no child is left behind. Schools’ futures and funding depend on the number of students who fall into performance bands like “Advanced," “Proficient,” and “Approaching Basic” based on bubble sheets and number two pencils.

This piece is part of a Collaborative Fund-curated series on creativity and values written by thought leaders in the for-profit, for-good business space.

But this is not the rant you think it is.
Let’s get one thing straight from the beginning: As a former high school teacher, I’m not opposed to standardized testing. Common assessments are a critical way of maintaining high expectations for all kids. Great teachers want benchmarks to measure progress and ensure that they are closing the gap between students in their classroom and the kids across town. What you measure should matter. The problem is, most American classrooms are measuring the wrong thing.
Schools used to be gatekeepers of knowledge, and memorization was key to success. Thus, we measured students’ abilities to regurgitate facts and formulas. Not anymore. As Seth Godin writes, “If there’s information that can be recorded, widespread digital access now means that just about anyone can look it up. We don’t need a human being standing next to us to lecture us on how to find the square root of a number.”

We don’t need a human to lecture us on how to find the square root of a number.

Given this argument, many entrepreneurs see a disruptive opportunity to “democratize” education, meaning that everyone now has a platform from which to teach, and anyone can learn anything anywhere anytime. Ventures like Udacity, ShowMe, LearnZillion, and Skillshare increase the efficiency of the learning market by lowering barriers to knowledge acquisition.
Yet there is an inherent bias in the promise of these new platforms that favors extraordinarily self-directed learners.
But by itself, this “any thing/place/time” learning won’t lead to the revolution we seek. We also have the responsibility of unlocking the potential of every student because the world needs more leaders, problem-finders, and rule-breakers. Teachers are perfectly positioned to take on this challenge.

Teaching’s primary purpose should be to ensure that every student graduates ready to tinker, create, and take initiative.

The primary purpose of teaching can now shift away from “stand and deliver” and becomes this: to be relentless about making sure every student graduates ready to tinker, create, and take initiative.
Sarah Beth Greenberg, a visionary elementary school principal in New Orleans, describes this as the balance between the art and science within teaching. The art is in the relationships you build with kids, and the science is purposeful assessment that generates real evidence of student growth.
Which brings me back to my original point. Accountability is a good thing, but only when you are measuring what matters.
Dan Meyer is right when he describes today’s curriculum as “paint-by-numbers classwork, robbing kids of a skill more important than solving problems: formulating them.” Imagine a world where the math textbook was replaced with open-ended, thought-provoking opportunities to question the world around us. In these classrooms, students would learn how to think, how to find problems, not just plug in numbers to solve them. What if quizzes measured kids’ ability to question, not answer?

Our schools must be staffed with passionate teachers who foster creativity, perseverance, and empathy.

Our schools should be producing kids who tinker, make, experiment, collaborate, question, and embrace failure as an opportunity to learn. Our schools must be staffed with passionate teachers who are not just prepared to foster creativity, perseverance, and empathy, but are responsible for ensuring kids develop these skills.
Most importantly, in these schools, old-fashioned gradebooks and multiple-choice tests aren’t good enough. Teachers need better tools to track several dimensions of student progress. Kids are more than just test scores. The narrative is important, and teaching demands a new type of CRM (classroom relationship management) to capture anecdotal notes and evidence of student growth. Teachers must become disciplined and analytical about identifying students’ strengths and skill gaps, continuously turning classroom data into a plan of action.
Schools like this exist in the dozens, but we need them in the hundreds of thousands:

• Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia uses a project-based learning model, where the core values of inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation and reflection are emphasized in all classes.
• Big Picture Learning schools across the country are built on the foundational principle that there is no canon of information that all students must know, an idea that flies in the face of the current Common Core standards movement.
• High schoolers who want to design software that changes lives can do so at the Academy for Software Engineering in New York City when it opens this August.
• And the school to which I’ll send my own kids hasn’t opened yet either. Bricolage Academy is a proposed new public elementary school in New Orleans. While the name conjures up images of the streets in the historic French Quarter, the name is borrowed from the French verb, bricoler, to tinker. Incubated in 4.0 Schools’ innovation lab, Bricolage’s founding principal recognizes that technology and increasing diversity will continue to influence our society in unpredictable ways and thus, a school must continually adapt so that students are prepared for the world they will enter as adults.

But we’re shortchanging kids if we aren’t relentless about measuring outcomes in these new models. Teachers are the linchpins here. They’re much more than just motivational coaches, they must become results-oriented diagnosticians of student learning.
In a world where the sheer volume and accessibility of information is growing exponentially, perhaps what’s most remarkable is that to create, tinker, and take initiative in this new world doesn’t always require high-tech gadgets. Take nine-year-old Caine Monroy and his cardboard arcade for example. Monroy has shown the world that all you need is a little ingenuity and a cardboard box.
Imagine a world in which all teachers were relentless about fostering that same creativity in all of their students.

What I’ve Learned About Learning

‘We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself.’ ~Lloyd Alexander

Post written by Leo Babauta.

I am a teacher and an avid learner, and I’m passionate about both.
I’m a teacher because I help Eva homeschool our kids — OK, she does most of the work, but I do help, mostly with math but with everything else too. I also teach habits, writing/blogging, simplicity and other fun topics in online courses.
I’m a lifelong learner and am always obsessively studying something, whether that’s breadmaking or language or wine or chess or writing or fitness.
Here’s are two key lessons — both really the same lesson — I’ve learned about learning, in all my years of study and in trying to teach people:

1. Almost everything I’ve learned, I didn’t learn in school; and
2. Almost everything my students (and kids) have learned, they learned on their own.

Those two lessons (or one lesson) have a number of reasons and implications for learning. Let’s take a look at some of them, in hopes you might find them useful.

Why Learning is Independent

One of the foundations of Unschooling, which Eva and I and the kids do here at home, is that you’re not teaching subjects to your kids — in fact, you’re not really teaching them at all. They take responsibility for their learning, and do it because they’re interested in something, not because you tell them they should learn it.
This is exactly how I learn as an adult, and so I know it works.
When teachers (wonderful people that they were) tried to teach me something in school, I often became bored, and just did what I needed to do to do well on the test. Not because the subject or the teacher was boring, but because it wasn’t something I cared about. They wanted me to learn it because they thought I should, but that’s not why people learn something. They learn it because they care about it — because they find it incredibly interesting, or because they need it to do something they really want to do.
When teachers succeeded in getting me to learn, it was only because they made something seem so interesting that I started to care about it. But then I learned on my own, either in class while ignoring everyone else, or more likely after class in the library or at home.
That’s because someone walking you through the steps of learning something doesn’t work — you aren’t learning when you’re just listening to someone tell you how something works. You’re learning when you try to do that something — putting it into action. That’s when the real learning begins and the superficial learning ends — when you try something and fail, and adjust and try again, and solve countless little problems as you do so.
The best teachers know this, and so they inspire, and help you to put the learning into action.
As an adult, I’ve learned a lot on my own. The stuff I’ve just read, I’ve mostly forgotten. But the stuff I’ve put into action by playing with it, by practicing, by creating and sharing with others — that stuff has stuck with me. I truly learned it.
I learned about blogging when I started blogging, and kept doing it for five years — not by reading blogs about blogging. My students have learned habits and decluttering and meditation and blogging from me not because I told them something brilliants, but because the ones who really learned put it into action. They formed a simple habit, decluttered their homes, did 5 minutes of meditation for 30 days, blogged.
This is where the real learning happens — when the fingers start moving, the feet start dancing, not when you hear or read something.

How to Learn (or Teach)

The teacher’s job, really, is to fascinate the student. Fascination is the key to learning. Then help the student put the fascination into action.
It follows then, that if you’re teaching yourself, your job is exactly the same.
Here’s how to learn:

1. Get fascinated. As a teacher, you should fascinate the student by rediscovering with her all the things that originally fascinated you about the topic. If you can’t get fascinated, you won’t care enough to really learn something. You’ll just go through the motions. How do you get fascinated? Often doing something with or for other people helps to motivate me to look more deeply into something, and reading about other people who have been successful/legendary at it also fascinates me.
2. Pour yourself into it. I will read every website and book I can get my hands on. Google and the library are my first stops. They’re free. The used bookstore will be next. There are always an amazing amount of online resources to learn anything. If there isn’t, create one.
3. Do it, in small steps. Actually doing whatever you want to do will be scary. You can learn as much Spanish vocabulary as you like, but until you start having conversations, you won’t really know it. You can read as much about chess as you like, but you have to put the problems into action, and play games. You can read about how to program, but you won’t know it until you actually code. Start with small, non-scary steps, with as little risk as possible, focusing on fun, easy skills.
4. Play. Learning isn’t work. It’s fun. If you’re learning because you think you should, not because you’re having fun with it, you will not really stick with it for long, or you’ll hate it and not care about it. So make it play. Make games out of it. Sing and dance while you do it. Show off your new skills to people, with a smile on your face.
5. Do it with others. I believe most learning is done on your own, but doing it with others makes it fun. I like to work out with my friends and with Eva. I like to bake bread for my family. I like to play chess with my kids. That motivates me to learn, because I want to do well when I do it with others.
6. Feel free to move around. I will dive into something for a couple weeks, and then move on to something else. That’s OK. That’s how passion for a topic often works. Sometimes it will last for a long time, sometimes it’s a short intense burst. You can’t control it. Allow yourself to wander if that’s where things lead you.
7. But deep learning takes months or years. You can learn a lot about something in 2-4 weeks, but you really become an expert at something only after months and years of doing it. I knew a lot about blogging after 6 months, but I waited a couple years before I was comfortable teaching others about it. Even now, after 5+ years of blogging, I’m still learning. The same applies to habits — I’ve learned a lot after 7 years of successfully creating habits, and now can actually teach it with some confidence. So how do you allow yourself to wander, but stick with something for long enough to get deep learning? By wandering around within the topic. You can learn a lot about wine in a month, for example, but what if after that you focused on cabernet sauvignon for a month, then zinfandel, then pinot noir? What if then you decided to learn about Oregon pinot noirs, then Sonoma pinots, then (the wonderful) pinots from Burgundy? You’d be wandering around, but going deeper and deeper. You can also move away from a topic, then get fascinated with it again and come back to it.
8. Test yourself. You can learn a lot of information quickly by studying something, testing yourself, studying again to fill in the holes in your knowledge, testing again, and repeating until you have it by heart. That’s not always the most fun way to learn, but it can work well. Alternatively, you can learn by playing, and when you play, allow that to be your test.
9. Disagree. Don’t just agree that everything you’re reading or hearing from others on a topic is correct, even if they are foremost experts. First, experts are often wrong, and it’s not until they are challenged that new knowledge is found. Second, even if they are right and you are wrong by disagreeing, you learn by disagreeing. By disagreeing, you have already not only considered what you’ve been given, but formulated an alternative theory. Then you have to try to test to see which is right, and even if you find that the first information or theory was right and you were wrong, now you know that much better than if you just agreed. I’m not saying to disagree with everything, but the more you do, the better you’ll learn. Don’t disagree in a disagreeable way, and don’t hold onto your theories too tightly and be defensive about them.
10. Teach it. There is no better way to cement your knowledge than to teach it to others. It’s OK if you don’t really know it that well — as long as you’re honest about that when you’re teaching it to someone. For example, I’m a beginner at chess, but I will learn something about it and teach it to my kids — they know I’m not a tournament contender, let alone a master, and yet I’m still teaching them something they don’t know. And when I do, I begin to really understand it, because to teach you have to take what you’ve absorbed, reflect upon it, find a way to organize it so that you can communicate it to someone else clearly enough for them to understand it, see their mistakes and help correct them, see where the holes in your knowledge are, and more.
11. Learning can be subliminal. We think we’re in control of our minds and we’re like programmers telling our minds what to learn, how to learn, and what data to retain. No. Our minds work in mysterious ways, and cannot be tightly controlled. They wander, latch onto the weirdest things, and soak up more than we know. Later, you can come back to what you’ve absorbed, and test yourself, and find you knew something you didn’t realize you knew. The lesson is to expose yourself to as much as possible on a topic, and allow yourself to absorb it. Sometimes your mind will pick up patterns you didn’t consciously realize were there, but then can use those patterns later when you put the learning into action.
12. Reflect on your learning by blogging. You soak up a ton of information and patterns, and you can put that into action, but when you sit down and reflect on what you’ve learned, and try to share that with others (as I’m doing right now), you force yourself to think deeply, to synthesize the knowledge and to organize it, much as you do when you teach it to others. Blogging is a great tool for reflection and sharing what you’ve learned, even if you don’t hope to make a living at it. And it’s free.

‘The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.’ ~Albert Einstein