I came across an interesting blog post on John Maeda “Thoughts On Simplicity” blog that speaks to teaching. The question is this: do you give a student all the answers they need verbatim, or do you send them to figure out the answers on their own?
I’ve learned in many different ways myself and recently I’ve found that the less I am taught, the better I learn. This is John’s perspective as well. He gives the example of a class he took where the instructor basically spoon-fed the answers to him. Then another course he took was the opposite: the teacher would answer questions with something like “go look it up, the answer is in the book!”.
In my own experience, I find that my first instinct is to ask someone to help me solve a problem (while I am hoping they will pretty much just show me the way step by step). In a few cases, like with my pal Aaron, I’ve learned more when he didn’t actually show me right away but waited for me to find the answer myself. So, like John Maeda’s view, I realized that the less I was taught, the more I learned.
It still seems like the opposite should be true, though…
