It's easy to get stuck in our ways

Key Takeaways

hello my front and friends and welcome to my podcast General musings my name is Kevin and this podcast is where I just like to talk about stuff usually in some way that's tendentially related to FR end development and often specifically CSS so today it's more of the tensal stuff I want to talk a little bit more about learning and before you leave if you're like Kevin you keep talking about this it's going be a little bit different than the things I've talked about before and the reason it even comes up is in my newsletter this week I was talking about how people are sometimes stubborn with taking on advice I see people and often asking for advice on different ways of learning it's a question I get a lot on how people can make the most of online learning so it's something I've talked about many times and I'm not going to do that necessarily today but I want to talk about a bit about how people get stuck in their ways even when they hear advice and then they dismiss it because they're just like oh that won't work for me and I that was sort of what I was talking about in the newsletter but what I didn't mention in there was I think one of the reasons that people dismiss things outright like that is because it doesn't go with how they prefer to learn and I get it we all have different ways that we prefer learning but there's a big difference between the way that you prefer to learn and the best way to learn and those are very different and there's a really good video uh on veritasium uh from a few years ago so I'll link to that in the show notes where he talks about how the whole learning styles thing is a complete myth I learned about this back when I was in university to become a teacher so like 10 years ago uh we were talking about that and I think it's even longer than that like this has been the the whole learning styles thing was debunked long ago even though there's like tons of quizzes you can do and online things and it's often even taught in school still today that you can you everybody has their own learning style that's you know I'm a visual learner or I'm a you know can kinesthetic learner I learn by doing stuff and all of that and the real way that people learn is just the multimodal approach the more different things you do to learn something the better so you read about it then after reading about it you watch someone do it and then after watching them do it you try it yourself and then after trying it yourself you do something else whatever it is but like mixing up as many different ways of learning something is always going to be the most beneficial and that's why for me it's always frustrating when I suggest things and people just dismiss outright saying well that will never work for me I won't try it cuz that's just it doesn't go with how I like to do things but if you're trying to learn something new and you're asking for advice on how to do it you should be willing to try things that might seem different or uncomfortable uh and not fit with what you're currently doing and this has been really important for me and it's one of the things i' I've talked about and I mentioned this in the newsletter I said I wasn't going to reference back to it but it was when I talked about scheduling learning time I guarantee you most people that I suggest that to don't actually do it and even for me it was a hard thing to do because it just seems weird to put that on your schedule and then there's always something more important to do and other stuff but that's why it's so important to schedule it and I know for me that was actually really impactful and it really helped me make sure that I was making the most of things because I had it on my calendar and it actually did more than just help me learn because I had my scheduled learning time where I put other things aside okay this is what I'm doing now it it took me a long time to do it because I'm not a scheduler I'm not good at following my calendars and other stuff like that and having a whole bunch of you know laid out tasks just not the style that I like to do but I saw that was actually being really effective for me and so it actually made me start using my calendar more and for other things so I have specific times on my calendar for writing newsletter for recording this podcast for working on my YouTube videos for doing my accounting for doing all my other things and I went from someone who didn't use a calendar at all right and just sort of winging it as much as possible to being much more organized and what it led to was me being much more organized and much more efficient with my time overall so the first step there was because I just wanted to try something with learning and making sure that I would actually do it was the big thing because the idea with scheduling things if you haven't heard me talk about it before when it comes to learning is to prevent yourself from overdoing it early on and just binging through a whole bunch of content and then after three days of doing that never going back to those lessons again and continuing with the course I'm sure everybody's done that I hope I'm not alone on it if that's the type of thing you might do you sort of slow having it on your schedule helps slow you down early on and then later on it helps you keep going because it's there and okay that's what I'm doing now and so I think it's really important we don't dismiss things just because they're not what we want to do and it's even why in my courses now the course I'm working on now and that well I'm get I'm actually getting close to the end of it finally which is beyond CSS where I I wanted to make sure that it would be multimodal and I don't know if some people get surprised because when they first get into the course the first like four lessons are only written content and so if you're used to me and following me on YouTube you're probably someone who says I'm more of a video or visual learner I guess and so you get all this written content and it might be a little bit of like oh this isn't what I signed up for but I I do say very early on in one of those first lessons that no it's not just written but there will be more writing because I want people to go through the text and then have little challenges and code they can play with to make sure they understand what they're reading about and then seeing videos that go through and show how things can be put into action and all of that and then projects St to work on and everything everything so and for me that's really important with online courses is finding ways to help the student as much as possible and I find that really hard teaching in the classroom is a million times easier for the teacher and it's something I've been struggling with a lot with online courses and creating content to help people learn is trying to make it as easy for the student as possible to learn and for me the way to do that is to try and make it as multimodal as possible and make sure there's challenges and not every answer is given because you can do that in the classroom you can give a project and and they you know they know most of the stuff to be able to do it and then let them figure it out from there uh and then you know but the advantage of the classroom is if somebody's stuck you can sort of just come in and get them over to that hurdle or Point them in the right direction you know reference back to that other thing you did and then that all of a sudden it clicks and they can solve it whereas you can't do that when you're not in the room with the person seeing what they're struggling with so obviously it does present some challenges there uh but I'm I'm selftaught so I you know I've gone through the whole self even self-taught it's a little bit of a misnomer because we're usually relying on courses and other stuff but yeah it is very different from doing in-person learning so anyway just to say don't don't get stuck in your ways if if you feel like you're trying to learn something and you're struggling with something try different things don't look for another video and then another video and then another video if the concept's not sticking for you go and look up a Blog article or go and ask somebody somewhere and play around with some code and and whatever it is like try different things and see if that helps a little bit uh because if you're just you know people do get stuck in their ways and I'm guilty of this as well I talk about this and I still catch myself doing things where I'm doing you know I keep going back to the same things that I'm most comfortable with and I do think that that is one thing that is true is even if you do have sort of a learning style quote unquote that isn't really beneficial for your learning I think the one place it can be beneficial is just you'll be more willing to learn something if the content is presented in a certain way right so if it's you know if you only say you looked at two online courses and one was only text based and the other one was only video based if you consider yourself more of a visual learner you'd probably be more willing to go with a video based course and you probably have a bit more success with it at least getting through maybe not more success in terms of what you would learn but more chances of actually finishing it just because you prefer that method of learning so if you prefer something I think there is you again you might not learn more but you might have a better chance of getting through more content that might be the one thing there and obviously that's different from like if you're learning in the classroom or something where I think as much as possible we want to mix things up I guess that's it I sort of got into a little bit of a ramble there and lost my way but I hope you enjoyed this episode anyway again I'll put a link to that ver same episode uh in the show notes because I I would suggest checking it out and with that thank you very much for listening and of course until next time don't forget to make your corner of the internet just a little bit more awesome