Why mainstream educational courses do not work for me

Rigidly structured educational courses do not work for me, and do not consider this any kind of 'learning disorder'. In fact, I am able to learn things perfectly effectively, but how I learn is different.

I have come to realize that the core problem is the rigid learning order set by education systems from school age through to universities. Information and skills are not linear, as anyone who has ever gotten lost following links on Wikipedia would know, you can start somewhere and follow connections from one topic to another, much like the structure of a spider web.

As I'm learning I'm aware of various information threads that branch out from a given topic, and my mind will tend to want to focus on one of these threads that is most relevant to whatever I'm most interested in at a given time.

This is incompatible with a fixed learning order, because my brain will tend to want to explore things in a very different order to what is being presented, which then leads to frustration or boredom.

Controlling environments also do not work for me on another level due to demand-avoidance tendencies, and I work most effectively when I'm able to control and direct my own learning. Anyone trying to control me against my wishes, will immediately result in push-back.

Also:

• I need to clearly know WHY is this thing useful to me? Without that information my mind will reject anything being taught. This is often a source of conflict as most educational systems dump information without giving any insight into what it is useful for. This probably relates to the point noted later regarding presenting things out of context.
• I need to understand the reasoning behind the design of, and expected outcome of, any learning materials. Without knowing this, my subconscious will tend to reject the entire approach. This isn't a conscious choice, just something my brain does.

What tends to work best for me is to learn about learning methods, seek information about a subject that I want to learn which does not impose a practice methodology, and then combine the two, creating an approach that's tailored to me. In a sense I work at a lower level of abstraction, to borrow a term from programming.

These things may be evolved traits that reduce susceptibility to misinformation, but are often critical to me being able to learn anything at all. Typically I need to adapt things to work for me due to factors I discuss later, and having this information is helpful.

Removing information too early

A common design pattern I have seen in lesson planning is to have the first part of the lesson with information presented, and then the second part expects students to make use of that information applied from memory, without access to reference.

A number of years ago, I took an evening class that was teaching Spanish, and the teacher structured it as such, introducing some phrases through a 'logical analysis' approach, then asking the students to practice these to make conversations among each other. I could not remember the phrases.

I have noted previously that I have almost no short-term memory. My neurotype seems to be optimized to learn by observing things happening in my environment repeatedly over a long period of time. If I am around some person who is doing the same thing consistently every day, I will start to pick up patterns in the things they are doing and become able to start copying them myself, and this process is entirely subconscious.

For example, to fix the aforementioned Spanish class, it would have worked better if there were two teachers, who would 'perform' the same kinds of conversations repeatedly over a number of sequential lessons, gradually adding in more complexity.

I need persistent exposure to information over a series of days to weeks, to see the same thing happening over and over again. Through that repetition, my subconscious would pick up on the repeated patterns and start to acquire things by itself until it becomes innate, what musicians call 'muscle memory'.

Presenting information out of context

School systems to a very large extent present information while giving no practical examples of how one may apply it for practical use. Mathematics is taught as abstract concepts with no practical application, and history is taught as a series of events and dates, without giving any examples of the practical lessons we can apply from it in our modern lives.

As was noted above, for me to be able to learn anything it needs to present a clear and immediate value in improving my ability to do the things that I want to do. Information presented out of context will thus be universally rejected.

An example of a learning resource that I found immensely valuable is Handmade hero, a video series in which Casey Muratori walks step by step through the process of programming a game engine and game from scratch. It worked very well for me because absolutely everything is in context, you 'practice' by typing the code yourself, and game development is something that interests me. Things can also be viewed out of order.

Casey has since shifted to teaching a class on how modern CPU's work and in doing so has taken a more 'traditional' approach teaching theory out of context, and it doesn't work for me. At one point he was teaching cache behavior using examples of looping over a block of memory, demonstrating how performance drops when the cache size boundaries are exceeded.

This is fine and obvious to me in isolation, but the lack of practical example, taking an algorithm with poor cache behavior, and changing it to perform better, means that I am unable to conceptualize how to apply the thing being taught to my actual work.

I think that Casey is doing great work, but it does provide an example how even the same person presenting things in different ways can drastically change the understandably of what is being taught, depending on the neurotype of the learner.

Rapid switching between unrelated tasks

Educational establishments typically break things into discrete 'subjects', and structure teaching as a series of lessons spanning at most an hour or two - one subject one hour, then a hard cut to something completely different.

For me, context changes like this are very hard to deal with, and what ends up happening internally is that the class is teaching one thing while my brain is still focused on the previous thing, or something completely unrelated altogether. It does not work for me.

What does work for me is as noted in the introductory section, to follow the things that interest me, focusing on one thing for potentially days or even weeks, until I reach a point where something else catches my attention, or I encounter something I can't do, and then pivot. Thus things flow with logical connections.

Broadly speaking the approach taken by education systems does not work for me, and the only times that I've been able to succeed in that environment have arisen from developing a deep understanding of the system and then changing it to fit my needs.

I got a triple distinction in a BTEC national diploma in computer programming between 2008 and 2010. During the first year of the course, I was doing very poorly due to the issues noted above. By the second year I was able to function much better because I had worked out how the course was graded and how the syllabus was designed.

BTEC courses are graded entirely on coursework with no examinations. I discarded the imposed lesson structures and did one module at a time, working directly from the syllabus and ignoring what I 'should' have been working on in a given class.

I had been learning about computers for years by myself prior to joining this course, and already knew a majority of what the course was teaching. It was mainly a job of producing documents to meet the requirements, and I worked in LaTeX as it enabled me to focus on writing without needing to think about layout, and this reduction in workload was very useful.

The change between the first year and second lead to me getting an award for 'most improved student', yet I feel this is more of an example of how the design of the system was failing me.

Too much commitment

Generally when I want to learn something it is because I want to solve a very specific problem, I am self driven and only do things that are of personal interest to me. The way that educational establishments only offer their services as multiple-year courses that place enormous demands of time, makes them useless to me today.

I am so aware of how my learning process works that I can say very quickly if a given teaching approach approach is going to work for me or not.

But in a broader sense to the general public, this structure forces people to commit to learning subjects that they do not have the information to know if they will even enjoy or be good at. It would really make a lot more sense to open things up, allow people to try a range of things, see what they enjoy / are good at, and only then commit to getting good at it.

The school system fails hard on this because the subjects being taught are abstract, children are not given the facility to 'role play' different real-world jobs, and thus do not have much of any idea what is actually available in the real world.

Historically I think this practical knowledge would have been normal because people would have learned from their immediate family, or directly within business environments, to a much greater extent. There would have been the ability to observe things happening over time, try things and experiment.

Decoupling learning from the environments where a skill is being applied has almost certainly also created a great deal of inefficiency. It is impossible to know exactly what someone needs to know, and so there's undoubtedly things being taught that will never be used, as well as skills that are missing, because they were not considered or taught at all.

Making this kind of educational resource in many cases the only option available, means that anyone who is incapable of learning in that way is prevented from participating in that job field altogether.

Final thoughts

I feel that the problems noted are created by the fundamental design of the systems, and can not be fixed without largely scrapping the system and rebuilding from scratch.

I believe that the best way of doing so would be to broadly deregulate things, create an environment with actual competition, and see what survives. Doing this would surely lead to an ecosystem where numerous options exist, which can be selected by the learner according to what works best for them.

I also feel that it would be highly beneficial to teach learners about different teaching / learning methods as early as possible, which would empower them to find approaches that work for them, and quickly reject methods that do not.

Also:

• Present information in a way that is interesting, and students actually will engage with of their own accord.
• Eliminate overbearing forced structure and instead teach people how to organize themselves, communicate, and collaborate.

Uniform opportunities can not be created by teaching everyone the same way, because people are not the same. It is impossible to say that any thoughtfully designed approach is objectively right or wrong, better or worse, because this can only be known in the context of an individual learner.